{"paper":{"title":"Second-Order Potentials for Finite Games: Existence, Characterisation, and Game Decomposition","license":"http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":["econ.TH"],"primary_cat":"cs.GT","authors_text":"Robert P. Gilles","submitted_at":"2026-08-03T09:34:50Z","abstract_excerpt":"Monderer and Shapley (1996) showed that a game is an exact potential game exactly when the players' cross-differences agree pair by pair, a symmetry condition on how any two players' incentives interlock. This paper asks what can be built from these characteristics when symmetry fails. The resulting MS-potential is constructed from the second differences that represent the game's common-interest elements. The MS-potential is unique up to separable payoff terms and it exists precisely when a higher-order MS-condition holds. On the class of exact potential games it recovers the potential up to t"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2608.01967","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2608.01967/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}