Efficiently Computing Equilibria in Budget-Aggregation Games

Patrick Becker, Alexander Fries, Matthias Greger, Erel Segal-Halevi

Keywords: budget aggregation, equilibrium computation, Nash equilibrium

Abstract: Budget aggregation deals with the social choice problem of distributing an exogenously given budget among a set of public projects, given agents' preferences. Taking a game-theoretic perspective, we initialize the study of budget-aggregation games where each agent has virtual decision power over some fraction of the budget. This paper investigates the structure and shows efficient computability of Nash equilibria for various common preference models in this setting. In particular, we show that equilibria for Leontief utilities can be found in polynomial time, solving an open problem from Brandt et al. [12], and give an explicit polynomial-time algorithm for computing equilibria for $\ell_1$ preferences.

Area: Game Theory and Economic Paradigms (GTEP)

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Submission Number: 693