Optimal Private Payoff Manipulation Against Commitment in Extensive-Form Games

Abstract

Stackelberg equilibrium describes the optimal strategies of a player, when she (the leader) first credibly commits to a strategy. Her opponent (the follower) will best respond to her commitment. To compute the optimal commitment, a leader must learn enough follower's payoff information. The follower can then potentially provide fake information, to induce a different final game outcome that benefits him more than when he truthfully behaves. We study such follower's manipulation in extensive-form games. For all four settings considered, we characterize all the inducible game outcomes. We show the polynomial-time tractability of finding the optimal payoff function to misreport. We compare the follower's optimal attainable utilities among different settings, with the true game fixed. In particular, one comparison shows that the follower gets no less when the leader's strategy space expands from pure strategies to behavioral strategies. Our work completely resolves this follower's optimal manipulation problem on extensive-form game trees.

Keywords: Stackelberg equilibrium, Strategic behavior, Private information manipulation, Extensive-form games