Expressiveness and Complexity Results for Strategic Reasoning

Abstract
This paper presents a range of expressiveness and complexity results for the specification, computation, and verification of Nash equilibria in multi-player non-zero-sum concurrent games in which players have goals expressed as temporal logic formulae. Our results are based on a novel approach to the characterisation of equilibria in such games: a semantic characterisation based on winning strategies and memoryful reasoning. This characterisation allows us to obtain a number of other results relating to the analysis of equilibrium properties in temporal logic. We show that, up to bisimilarity, reasoning about Nash equilibria in multi-player non-zero-sum concurrent games can be done in ATL^* and that constructing equilibrium strategy profiles in such games can be done in 2EXPTIME using finite-memory strategies. We also study two simpler cases, two-player games and sequential games, and show that the specification of equilibria in the latter setting can be obtained in a temporal logic that is weaker than ATL^*. Based on these results, we settle a few open problems, put forward new logical characterisations of equilibria, and provide improved answers and alternative solutions to a number of questions.