DOI: 10.3390/math14214029 ISSN: 2227-7390

EquiPartition: Learning Player-Adaptive Deviation Certificates for Complete Enclosure of Approximate Nash Equilibria in Strategic Financial Markets

Jinjia Chen, Kun Yang, Danhua Liu, Yingchao Wang, Feng Xue

Strategic financial markets can admit multiple approximate Nash equilibria with materially different liquidation and price-impact regimes. Returning one equilibrium cannot exclude a more stressed alternative, yet complete enclosure becomes expensive when the profitable deviator changes inside a search region. We propose EquiPartition, a learning-augmented branch-and-bound method based on player-adaptive deviation certificates. The certificate combines institution-specific unilateral-deviation atoms through state-dependent Bernstein weights, while an outward-rounded verifier alone authorizes exclusion. Inconclusive proposals undergo bounded repair or conservative subdivision, so prediction quality affects efficiency but not the complete ε-Nash outer-enclosure guarantee. On the controlled and multi-institution synthetic one-period fire-sale markets, the finite recorded-reference audit retained all recorded high-precision reference-equilibrium components and found no accepted exclusion intersecting them. Relative to Nash-B&B, Predict+Repair reduced proof-tree nodes by 83.3% and 83.9%, unresolved volume by 75.8% and 69.0%, and mean capped runtime by 40.5% and 20.2%; it completed 113 of 120 multi-institution instances versus 103 for Nash-B&B. The same finite recorded-reference audit retained all recorded crisis components under the financial stress shifts. Runtime decomposition showed that amortized proposals avoided repeated neutral-start optimization and offset repair and verification costs. EquiPartition reduces proof fragmentation while preserving verifier-based completeness.

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