The price of anarchy in games of incomplete information

We define smooth games of incomplete information. We prove an “extension theorem ” for such games: price of anarchy bounds for pure Nash equilibria for all induced full-information games extend automatically, without quantitative degradation, to all mixed-strategy Bayes-Nash equilibria with respect to a product prior distribution over players ’ preferences. We also note that, for Bayes-Nash equilibria in games with correlated player preferences, there is no general extension theorem for smooth games. We give several applications of our definition and extension theorem. First, we show that many games of incomplete information for which the price of anarchy has been studied are smooth in our sense. Our extension theorem unifies much of the known work on the price of anarchy in games of incomplete information. Second, we use our extension theorem to prove new bounds on the price of anarchy of Bayes-Nash equilibria in routing games with incomplete information.