When are complements and substitutes dual?
For binary-action games on bipartite networks, strategic complements and strategic substitutes are one and the same: each can be transformed into the other by relabelling the actions of every player on exactly one side. In this note, I show that bipartiteness is necessary and sufficient for such a relabelling; as a consequence, bipartite networks are precisely those on which every binary-action game with strategic substitutes must have a pure-strategy Nash equilibrium.
Authors
- Philip Ruane Neary (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9639-6147)
Publication Details
- Journal
- arXiv (Cornell University)
- Published
- 2026-10-29
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2610.39844
- Primary Topic
- Game Theory and Applications
- Type
- preprint