The Cut and Play Algorithm: Computing Nash Equilibria via Outer Approximations
By Margarida Carvalho, Gabriele Dragotto, Andrea Lodi, Sriram Sankaranarayanan
July 2026
July 2026
Citation
Carvalho, Margarida., Dragotto, Gabriele., Lodi, Andrea., Sankaranarayanan, Sriram. (2025). The Cut and Play Algorithm: Computing Nash Equilibria via Outer Approximations .
Copyright
2025
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Abstract
We introduce Cut-and-Play, a practically efficient algorithm for computing Nash equilibria in simultaneous noncooperative games where players decide via nonconvex and possibly unbounded optimization problems with separable payoff functions. Our algorithm exploits an intrinsic relationship between the equilibria of the original nonconvex game and the ones of a convexified counterpart. In practice, Cut-and-Play formulates a series of convex approximations of the game and iteratively refines them with cutting planes and branching operations. Our algorithm does not require convexity or continuity of the player’s optimization problems and can be integrated with existing optimization software. We test Cut-and-Play on two families of challenging nonconvex games involving discrete decisions and bilevel problems, and we empirically demonstrate that it efficiently computes equilibria while outperforming existing game-specific algorithms.
Sriram Sankaranarayanan is an Assistant Professor in the area of Operations Management at the Indian School of Business. He earned his B. Tech from IIT Kharagpur. He then completed his Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins University (with Prof Sauleh Siddiqui and Prof Amitabh Basu), followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Polytechnique Montréal under the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Data Science for Real-Time Decision-Making (with Prof. Andrea Lodi). Following that, he was an assistant professor at IIM Ahmedabad from December 2020 to May 2025.

Sriram Sankaranarayanan