The equilibria of independent distributions on unbalanced game trees

The work reported here is our first attempt to investigate the equilibria of independent distributions (ID) on unbalanced game trees, after a long series of studies on balanced AND-OR trees, e.g., Liu and Tanaka (Inform Process Lett 104(2):73–77, 2007; Liu and Tanaka (The computational complexity of game trees by eigen-distribution. In: Proceeding 436 of the 1st International Conference on COCOA, pp. 323–334, 2007; Suzuki and Niida (Ann Pure Appl Log 166(11):1150–1164, 2015; Peng et al. (Inform Process Lett 125:41–45, 2017; Suzuki (Ann Jpn Assoc Philos Sci 25:79–88, 2017; Inform Process Lett 139:13–17, 2018); Peng et al. (Methodol Comput Appl Probab 24:277–287, 2022). To handle an unbalanced tree, we decompose the tree into subtrees with different weights (= costs). The present research not only generalizes our previous results on balanced trees to unbalanced weighted trees, but also gives simpler inductive proofs and new perspectives for some old results. Our primary objective is to characterize the “eigen-distribution" d ∈ ID(r) for a weighted game tree (with a fixed probability for the root having value 0 as 0