Fair Selection of Generalized Nash Equilibria: A Comparability Perspective

Abstract

Generalized Nash equilibrium (GNE) problems model self-interested agents coupled through their costs and shared constraints, and arise throughout control applications that allocate a scarce common resource. Such problems typically admit a continuum of equilibria, so any implementation must \emph{select} one. This selection is not neutral: it decides how the cost of the shared constraint is distributed among the agents, a decision often expected to be fair. The variational GNE (v-GNE), which charges all agents a uniform shadow price, is the conventional choice and is frequently advocated as fair. Through the lens of \emph{comparability} from social choice theory, we show that the GNE set itself requires no inter-agent comparability of costs, whereas the v-GNE implicitly assumes cardinal unit comparability, one of the stronger notions. We then introduce the fair GNE (f-GNE), which selects an equilibrium by explicitly optimizing a fairness metric matched to the comparability at hand, and give constructive routes to compute it for single-constraint and linear-quadratic games. An electric-vehicle charging game serves as a running example throughout this self-contained tutorial.