Stability of international pollution control games: A potential game approach

Abstract

<p style='text-indent:20px;'>In this paper, stabilization problems for <i>n-</i>player noncooperative differential games of international pollution control (IPC) are analysed via the concept of the potential differential game (PDG) introduced by Fonseca-Morales and Hernández-Lerma (2018). By first identifying a game of IPC as a PDG, an associated optimal control problem (OCP) is obtained, whose optimal solution is a Nash equilibrium (NE) for the game of IPC. Thus, the problem of finding conditions for which the NE stabilizes the game of IPC reduces to finding conditions for which the optimal solution stabilizes the associated OCP. The concept not only yields mild conditions for saddle point stability analysed in the literature but also for the overtaking optimality of the NE of the game of IPC.</p>