Nash Social Welfare for Multi Armed Bandits: Trajectory-wise Expected and High Probability Regret

Avishek Ghosh

We study fair multi-armed bandits under the Nash Social Welfare (NSW) objective, which measures performance via the geometric mean of accumulated rewards. Existing work defines Nash regret as $\mathrm{NR}_T = μ^\star - (\prod_{t=1}^T \mathbb{E}μ_{I_t})^{1/T}$, where $μ_{I_t}$ is the mean reward of the recommended arm $I_t$ and $T$ is the horizon. Since it applies the geometric mean to per-round marginal expectations, it ignores the joint distribution of rewards across rounds, leaving the NSW fairness motivation unaddressed at the trajectory level. We propose \emph{trajectory-wise Nash regret} $\widetilde{\mathrm{NR}}_T = μ^\star - \mathbb{E}[(\prod_{t=1}^T μ_{I_t})^{1/T}]$, which computes the geometric mean over complete sample paths before taking expectations, capturing NSW fairness more faithfully. By Jensen's inequality, $\widetilde{\mathrm{NR}}_T \geq \mathrm{NR}_T$, making it a strictly stronger metric. We also introduce \emph{high probability Nash regret} $\widehat{\mathrm{NR}}_T = μ^\star - (\prod_t μ_{I_t})^{1/T}$, giving the first high probability regret bounds in fair bandits. Our two-phase algorithm, Round Robin Nash Confidence Bound (\texttt{RR-NCB}), combines round…