Query Complexity of Approximate Equilibria in Anonymous Games

We study the computation of equilibria of anonymous games, via algorithms that may proceed via a sequence of adaptive queries to the game's payoff function, assumed to be unknown initially. The general topic we consider is query complexity, that is, how many queries are necessary or sufficient to compute an exact or approximate Nash equilibrium. We show that exact equilibria cannot be found via query-efficient algorithms. We also give an example of a 2-strategy, 3-player anonymous game that does not have any exact Nash equilibrium in rational numbers. However, more positive query-complexity bounds are attainable if either further symmetries of the utility functions are assumed or we focus on approximate equilibria. We investigate four sub-classes of anonymous games previously considered by citebfh09, dp14. Our main result is a new randomized query-efficient algorithm that finds a O(n-1/4)-approximate Nash equilibrium querying tildeO(n3/2) payoffs and runs in time tildeO(n3/2). This improves on the running time of pre-existing algorithms for approximate equilibria of anonymous games, and is the first one to obtain an inverse polynomial approximation in poly-time. We also show how this can be utilized as an efficient polynomial-time approximation scheme (PTAS). Furthermore, we prove that Omega(n logn) payoffs must be queried in order to find any ε-well-supported Nash equilibrium, even by randomized algorithms.