Game connectivity and adaptive dynamics in many-action games

Tom Johnston, Michael Savery, Alex Scott and Bassel Tarbush

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: We study the typical structure of games in terms of their connectivity properties. A game is said to be `connected' if it has a pure Nash equilibrium and the property that there is a best-response path from every action profile which is not a pure Nash equilibrium to every pure Nash equilibrium, and it is generic if it has no indifferences. In previous work we showed that, among all $n$-player $k$-action generic games that admit a pure Nash equilibrium, the fraction that are connected tends to $1$ as $n$ gets sufficiently large relative to $k$. The present paper considers the large-$k$ regime, which behaves differently: we show that the connected fraction tends to $1-\zeta_n$ as $k$ gets large, where $\zeta_n>0$. In other words, a constant fraction of many-action games are not connected. However, $\zeta_n$ is small and tends to $0$ rapidly with $n$, so as $n$ increases all but a vanishingly small fraction of many-player-many-action games are connected. Since connectedness is conducive to equilibrium convergence we obtain, by implication, that there is a simple adaptive dynamic that is guaranteed to lead to a pure Nash equilibrium in all but a vanishingly small fraction of generic games that have one. Our results are based on new probabilistic and combinatorial arguments which allow us to address the large-$k$ regime that the approach used in our previous work could not tackle. We thus complement our previous work to provide a more complete picture of game connectivity across different regimes.

Date: 2026-01
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