Unit-sphere games

Abstract: This paper introduces a class of games, called unit-sphere games, where strategies are real vectors with unit 2-norms (or, on a unit-sphere). As a result, they can no longer be interpreted as probability distributions over actions, but rather be thought of as allocations of one unit of resource to actions and the multiplicative payoff effect on each action is proportional to square-root of the amount of resource allocated to that action. The new definition generates a number of interesting consequences. We first characterize sufficient and necessary conditions under which a two-player unit-sphere game has a Nash equilibrium. The characterization effectively reduces solving a unit-sphere game to finding all eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the product of individual payoff matrices. For any unit-sphere game with non-negative payoff matrices, there always exists a unique Nash equilibrium; furthermore, the unique equilibrium is efficiently reachable via Cournot adjustment. In addition, we show that any equilibrium in positive unit-sphere games corresponds to approximate equilibria in the corresponding normal-form games. Analogous but weaker results are extended to positive n-player unit-sphere games.