Distributed games with jumps: An α-potential game approach

Abstract

Motivated by game-theoretic models of crowd motion dynamics, this paper analyzes a broad class of distributed games with jump diffusions within the recently developed $α$-potential game framework. We demonstrate that analyzing the $α$-Nash equilibria reduces to solving a finite-dimensional control problem. Beyond the viscosity and verification characterizations for the general games, we explicitly and in detail examine how spatial population distributions and interaction rules influence the structure of $α$-Nash equilibria in these distributed settings, and in particular for crowd motion games. Our theoretical results are supported by numerical implementations using policy gradient-based algorithms, further demonstrating the computational advantages of the $α$-potential game framework in computing Nash equilibria for general dynamic games.