Dynamics in near-potential games

Summary form only given. Potential games is a class of games for which many of the simple user dynamics, such as best response dynamics and fictitious play, converge to a Nash equilibrium. The objective of this paper is to examine whether the convergence properties of dynamics in potential games can be extended to games that are "close" to potential games, thereby enhancing the predictability of user interactions. Intuitively, dynamics in potential games and dynamics in games that are close (in terms of the payoffs of the players) to potential games should be related. In this paper, we make this intuition precise by establishing convergence of dynamics to "approximate" equilibrium sets in near-potential games.