Computing Optimal Commitments to Strategies and Outcome-Conditional Utility Transfers
Abstract: Prior work [14,15] has studied the computational complexity of computing optimal strategies to commit to in Stackelberg or leadership games, where a leader commits to a strategy which is then observed by one or more followers. We extend this setting to one in which the leader can additionally commit to outcome-conditional utility transfers. In this setting, we characterize the computational complexity of finding optimal commitments for normal-form and Bayesian games. We find a mix of polynomial time algorithms and NP-hardness results. Then, we allow the leader to additionally commit to a signaling scheme based on her action, inducing a correlated equilibrium. In this variant, optimal commitments can be computed efficiently for arbitrarily many players.
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