A novel method to compute Nash equilibrium in non-cooperative n-person games based on differential evolutionary algorithm

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Li, Changbing^{; *} | Cao, Huiying | Du, Maokang

Affiliations: Key Laboratory of Electronic Commerce and Logistics, Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Chongqing, China

Correspondence: [*] Corresponding author: Changbing Li, Key Laboratory of Electronic Commerce and Logistics, Chongqing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Chongqing, China. E-mail: lcbss@126.com

Abstract: Nash equilibrium constitutes a central solution concept in game theory. In this paper, a Nash equilibrium of a finite n-person non-cooperative game can be formulated to an non-linear optimal solution of the optimization model with zero optimal value. This paper investigates the effectiveness of differential evolutionary optimization to compute Nash equilibrium of non-cooperative n-person games, as global minimum of a real-valued function. The experiments demonstrate the feasibility of this approach for finding an equilibrium of an N-person game.

Keywords: Nash equilibrium, n-person matrix game, nonlinear constrained optimization, differential evolutionary algorithm

DOI: 10.3233/IDT-140189

Journal: Intelligent Decision Technologies, vol. 8, no. 3, pp. 207-213, 2014