English

The Complexity of Sparse Win-Lose Bimatrix Games

Computational Complexity 2026-02-23 v1 Computer Science and Game Theory Theoretical Economics

Abstract

We prove that computing an ϵ\epsilon-approximate Nash equilibrium of a win-lose bimatrix game with constant sparsity is PPAD-hard for inverse-polynomial ϵ\epsilon. Our result holds for 3-sparse games, which is tight given that 2-sparse win-lose bimatrix games can be solved in polynomial time.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.18380,
  title  = {The Complexity of Sparse Win-Lose Bimatrix Games},
  author = {Eleni Batziou and John Fearnley and Abheek Ghosh and Rahul Savani},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.18380},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

43 pages

R2 v1 2026-07-01T10:44:30.374Z