Deception in Nash Equilibrium Seeking

In socio-technical multi-agent systems, deception exploits privileged information to induce false beliefs in “victims,” keeping them oblivious and leading to outcomes detrimental to them or advantageous to the deceiver. We consider model-free Nash-equilibrium-seeking for non-cooperative games with asymmetric information and introduce model-free deceptive algorithms with stability guarantees. In the simplest algorithm, the deceiver includes in his action policy the victim's exploration signal, with an amplitude tuned by an integrator of the regulation error between the deceiver's actual and desired payoff. The integral feedback drives the deceiver's payoff to the payoff's reference value, while the victim is led to adopt a suboptimal action, at which the pseudogradient of the deceiver's payoff is zero. The deceiver's and victim's actions turn out to constitute a “deceptive” Nash equilibrium of a different game, whose structure is managed — in real time — by the deceiver. We examine quadratic, aggregative, and more general games and provide conditions for a successful deception, mutual and benevolent deception, and immunity to deception (for a “non-generic” set of payoff functions). Stability results are established using techniques based on averaging and singular perturbations. Among the examples in the paper is a microeconomic duopoly in which the deceiver induces in the victim a belief that the buyers disfavor the deceiver more than they actually do, leading the victim to increase the price above the Nash price, and resulting in an increased profit for the deceiver and a decreased profit for the victim. A study of the deceiver's integral feedback for the desired profit reveals that, in duopolies with equal marginal costs, a deceiver that is greedy for very high profit can attain any such profit, and pursue this with arbitrarily high integral gain (impatiently), irrespective of the market preference for the victim.