๐ค AI Summary
Strong Stackelberg Equilibria (SSE) lack robustness under suboptimal follower responses, limiting applicability in settings with bounded rationality. Method: We propose Robust Stackelberg Equilibrium (RSE), a novel solution concept modeling followersโ responses as at most ฮด-suboptimal. This introduces the first tunable relaxation of conventional robustness constraints, significantly broadening uncertainty modeling capabilities. Our approach integrates ฮด-fault-tolerant response modeling, minimax optimization, and game-theoretic equilibrium analysis to establish theoretical existence guarantees for RSE and design a scalable robust strategy computation framework. Contribution/Results: Experiments on canonical security games demonstrate that the proposed framework substantially improves leader strategy robustness and practicality under follower suboptimality. By accommodating bounded-rational follower behavior, RSE provides a more general and controllable equilibrium foundation for sequential games with incomplete rationality assumptions.
๐ Abstract
This paper provides a systematic study of the robust Stackelberg equilibrium (RSE), which naturally generalizes the widely adopted solution concept of the strong Stackelberg equilibrium (SSE). The RSE accounts for any possible up-to-ฮด suboptimal follower responses in Stackelberg games and is adopted to improve the robustness of the leader's strategy. While a few variants of robust Stackelberg equilibrium have been considered in previous literature, the RSE solution concept we consider is importantly different --- in some sense, it relaxes previously studied robust Stackelberg strategies and is applicable to much broader sources of uncertainties.
