The Game Changer Problem: Controlling Equilibria with Discrete Rewards

Abstract

We introduce the game changer problem, where an external designer modifies a game's reward matrix to make a target pure action profile the unique equilibrium, subject to the constraint that all entries of the reward matrix come from a finite set. We give simple feasibility characterizations for two-player zero-sum games and general-sum games, and the discrete reward structure yields exact optimality and enables efficient dynamic programming algorithms, providing a sharper alternative to prior continuous reward redesign formulations based on linear programming.