Efficiently Characterizing Games Consistent with Perturbed Equilibrium Observations

Citation

Ziani, Juba (2017) Efficiently Characterizing Games Consistent with Perturbed Equilibrium Observations. Master's thesis, California Institute of Technology. doi:10.7907/Z91Z42CF. https://resolver.caltech.edu/CaltechTHESIS:12122016-183248666

Abstract

In this thesis, we study the problem of characterizing the set of games that are consistent with observed equilibrium play, a fundamental problem in econometrics. Our contribution is to develop and analyze a new methodology based on convex optimization to address this problem, for many classes of games and observation models of interest. Our approach provides a sharp, computationally efficient characterization of the extent to which a particular set of observations constrains the space of games that could have generated them. This allows us to solve a number of variants of this problem as well as to quantify the power of games from particular classes (e.g., zero-sum, potential, linearly parameterized) to explain player behavior.

We illustrate our approach with numerical simulations.

Thesis Files