BAR Nash equilibrium and application to blockchain design

Olga Gorelkina, Rida Laraki and Maxime Reynouard

Games and Economic Behavior, 2025, vol. 154, issue C, 285-301

Abstract: This paper presents a novel solution concept, called BAR Nash Equilibrium (BARNE) and applies it to the Verifier's Dilemma, a fundamental problem in the design of blockchain consensus. BARNE extends the Nash Equilibrium (NE) to accommodate interactions among Byzantine, altruistic, and rational agents, known as the BAR setting in the distributed computing literature. We prove the existence of BARNE in a broad class of games and introduce two refinements: global stability and local stability. We demonstrate that in the classical quorum-based blockchain protocol, honestly following the prescribed strategy is not a locally stable BARNE, whereas free-riding is a globally stable BARNE. To address this, we designed a more robust protocol with the same classical guarantees, by incorporating fines and forced errors. Under this new protocol, honesty becomes the unique globally stable BARNE, and free-riding is never a BARNE.

Keywords: BAR model; Verifier's dilemma; Quorum based consensus protocols; Blockchain design, local and global stability of equilibria (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S089982562500137X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:gamebe:v:154:y:2025:i:c:p:285-301

DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2025.09.008

Access Statistics for this article

Games and Economic Behavior is currently edited by E. Kalai

More articles in Games and Economic Behavior from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().