The Structure of Utility Functions Ensuring the Existence of an Exact Potential in a Strategic Game

摘要

Strategic games in which the profit of each participant is the sum of local profits gained by means certain "objects" and shared by all players using these objects are considered. If each object satisfies a regularity condition, then the game has an exact potential. Both universal classes of potential games considered previously in the literature, overflow games and games with structured utility functions, are contained in the class under consideration and satisfy the regularity condition.