Distributed Nash Equilibrium Seeking in Strongly Contractive Aggregative Population Games

This article addresses the problem of distributed Nash equilibrium (NE) seeking in strongly contractive aggregative multipopulation games subject to partial-decision information. In particular, we consider the scenario where the so-called payoff providers of the multiple populations communicate through a possibly noncomplete network, and we formulate some consensuslike dynamics for the payoff providers to distributedly compute their payoff signals using local information only. Moreover, by exploiting the notions of
$\delta$
-passivity and
$\delta$
-antipassivity, we provide a unified analysis for several classes of evolutionary game dynamics. As the main contributions, we provide sufficient conditions to guarantee the
$\delta$
-antipassivity of a class of continuous-time dynamical systems, and we exploit such results to design distributed NE seeking dynamics for strongly contractive aggregative population games, as well as for a class of merely contractive aggregative population games. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first article to consider the problem of distributed NE seeking for such classes of population games and from a unifying passivity-based perspective.