Regret Minimization Algorithms for the Followers Behaviour Identification in Leadership Games

Abstract

We study for the first time, a leadership game in which one agent, acting as leader, faces another agent, acting as follower, whose behaviour is not known a priori by the leader, being one among a set of possible behavioural profiles. The main motivation is that in real-world applications the common game-theoretical assumption of perfect rationality is rarely met, and any specific assumption on bounded rationality models, if wrong, could lead to a significant loss for the leader. The question we pose is whether and how the leader can learn the behavioural profile of a follower in leadership games. This is a “natural” online identification problem: in fact, the leader aims at identifying the follower’s behavioural profile to exploit at best the potential non-rationality of the opponent, while minimizing the regret due to the initial lack of information. We propose two algorithms based on different approaches and we provide a regret analysis. Furthermore, we experimentally evaluate the pseudo-regret of the algorithms in concrete leadership games, showing that our algorithms outperform the online learning algorithms available in the state of the art.