We show that the widely used homotopy method for solving fixpoint problems,
as well as the Harsanyi-Selten equilibrium selection process for games, are
PSPACE-complete to implement. Extending our result for the Harsanyi-Selten
process, we show that several other homotopy-based algorithms for finding
equilibria of games are also PSPACE-complete to implement. A further
application of our techniques yields the result that it is PSPACE-complete to
compute any of the equilibria that could be found via the classical
Lemke-Howson algorithm, a complexity-theoretic strengthening of the result in
[Savani and von Stengel]. These results show that our techniques can be widely
applied and suggest that the PSPACE-completeness of implementing homotopy
methods is a general principle.Comment: 23 pages, 1 figure; to appear in FOCS 2011 conferenc
