Linde Institute/SISL Seminar: Juba Ziani, Caltech

Abstract: We study the problem of characterizing the set of games that are consistent with observed equilibrium play. 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.