Nash Equilibrium Individualized Treatment Regimes under Network Interference

Abstract

Network interference creates a fundamental tension in optimal individualized treatment regime learning: maximizing overall population outcomes may come at the expense of some individuals' outcomes. Existing optimal individualized treatment regime methods under interference primarily target population-level objectives without accounting for individual optimality. Motivated by this tension, we introduce Nash equilibrium individualized treatment regimes, or simply Nash regimes, which directly target individual optimality under interference. Under a Nash regime, no individual can improve their conditional expected outcome through unilateral deviation when all other individuals follow the regime. We establish conditions for the existence of Nash regimes. When no exact Nash regime exists, we introduce an $α^*$-Nash regime as an alternative target that minimizes regret relative to individual optimality. We then develop Nash learning, a doubly robust procedure for estimating the proposed regimes. Under a super-population random-graph framework accommodating both sparse and dense networks, we characterize how network sparsity and treatment assignment mechanisms affect estimation performance. Simulations and a real-data application demonstrate that Nash learning improves individual optimality while maintaining competitive population-level performance.