Effectiveness of the Nash strategies in competitive multi-team target assignment problems

The Nash strategy in game theory has often been criticized as being ineffective in competitive multi-team target assignment problems, especially when compared with other simplistic strategies such as the random or greedy targeting strategies. This criticism arises from the fact that the Nash strategies may yield unpredictable results when paired with non-Nash strategies in non-zero sum games. In addition, the Nash equilibrium is generally more difficult to compute than strategies which do not attempt to anticipate the strategy of the other side. The authors seek to show that in multi-team target assignment problems the Nash strategy is superior to such simplistic strategies while also remaining computationally feasible. To demonstrate this point, an attrition model was considered, consisting of two teams of nonhomogeneous fighting units simultaneously targeting each other and compare the outcomes when various combinations of four targeting strategies are used on each side. The four strategies are: 1) the random strategy where each unit selects its target randomly, 2) the unit greedy strategy where each unit chooses the target that optimizes its own performance only, 3) the team optimal strategy where the units coordinate their choice of targets so as to optimize the overall team performance while ignoring the possible strategy choices by the other team, and 4) the team Nash strategy, calculated under the assumption that the other team is also using a Nash strategy. Because the computational requirements for calculating the team Nash strategies may become unfeasibly large, an efficient method was discussed for approximating the Nash strategies using a neighborhood search algorithm called unit level team resource allocation (ULTRA). The results were compared for all 16 possible combinations of these four targeting strategies and show that for each team the Nash strategy outperforms all other strategies irrespective of the strategy employed by the other team