The model of congestion games is widely used to analyze games related to traffic and communication. A central property of these games is that they are potential games and hence posses a pure Nash equilibrium. In reality it is often the case that some players cooperatively decide on their joint action in order to maximize the coalition's total utility. This is by modeled by Coalitional Congestion Games. Typical settings include truck drivers who work for the same shipping company, or routers that belong to the same ISP. The formation of coalitions will typically imply that the resulting coalitional congestion game will no longer posses a pure Nash equilibrium. In this paper we provide conditions under which such games are potential games and posses a pure Nash equilibrium.
We present a general framework to model strategic aspects and stable and fair resource allocations in networks via variants and generalizations of path coalitional games. In these games, a coalition of edges or vertices is successful if it can enable an s-t path. We present polynomial-time algorithms to compute and verify least core payoffs of cost-based generalizations of path coalitional games and their duals, thereby settling a number of open problems. The least core payoffs of path coalitional games are completely characterized and a polynomial-time algorithm for computing the nucleolus of…
We introduce a framework for studying the effect of cooperation on the quality of outcomes in utility games. Our framework is a coalitional analog of the smoothness framework of non-cooperative games. Coalitional smoothness implies bounds on the strong price of anarchy, the loss of quality of coalitionally stable outcomes, as well as bounds on coalitional versions of coarse correlated equilibria and sink equilibria, which we define as out-of-equilibrium myopic behavior as determined by a natural coalitional version of best-response dynamics. Our coalitional smoothness framework captures existi…
The issue of group-blind multiuser detection in MAC channel among wireless nodes in the environment of multiple networks coexisting and sharing spectrum is addressed under the Framework of coalitional game. We investigate the performance and stability of multiple access channel (MAC) with linear decorrelating multiuser detection under varying SNR, channel gains and coalitional structures, in which both single BS and multiple BSs cases were considered. The main results and conclusion are as follows: (1) the grand coalition is payoff maximizing under loose SNR; (2) it is in conformity with group…
Mobile edge computing (MEC), affords service to the vicinity of mobile devices (MDs), has become a key technology for future network. Offloading big data to the MEC server for preprocessing is a attractive choice of MDs. In the paper, we investigate data offloading from MDs to MEC servers. A coalitional game based pricing scheme is proposed. We apply coalitional game to depict the offloading relationship between MDs and MEC servers, and utilize pricing as the stimuli for the offloading. A scheduled MD chooses one MEC server within the same coalition for offloading, and pays the selected MEC se…
In coalitional games, traditional coalitional game theory does not apply if different participants hold different opinions about the payoff function that corresponds to each subset of the coalition. In this paper, we propose a framework in which players can exchange opinions about their views of payoff functions and then decide the distribution of the value of the grand coalition. When all players are truth-telling, the problem of opinion consensus is decoupled from the coalitional game, but interesting dynamics will arise when players are strategic in the consensus phase. Assuming that all pl…
Properties of the core and other solution concepts of Bel coalitional games in the ex-ante scenario
Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic（布拉格查理大学）；Paris School of Economics, Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, Centre d’Economie de la Sorbonne, Paris, France（巴黎经济学校，巴黎第一大学先贤祠-索邦大学，索邦经济中心）；Dipartimento di Economia, Università degli Studi di Perugia, Perugia, Italy（佩鲁贾大学经济系）
Coalitional games serve the purpose of modeling payoff distribution problems in scenarios where agents can collaborate by forming coalitions in order to obtain higher worths than by acting in isolation. In the classical Transferable Utility (TU) setting, coalition worths can be freely distributed amongst agents. However, in several application scenarios, this is not the case and the Non-Transferable Utility setting (NTU) must be considered, where additional application-oriented constraints are imposed on the possible worth distributions. In this paper, an approach to define NTU games is propos…
We introduce a measure for the level of stability against coalitional deviations, called \emph{stability scores}, which generalizes widely used notions of stability in non-cooperative games. We use the proposed measure to compare various Nash equilibria in congestion games, and to quantify the effect of game parameters on coalitional stability. For our main results, we apply stability scores to analyze and compare the Generalized Second Price (GSP) and Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) ad auctions. We show that while a central result of the ad auctions literature is that the GSP and VCG auctions imp…
Popular content distribution is one of the key services provided by vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), in which a popular file is broadcasted by roadside units (RSUs) to the on-board units (OBUs) driving through a particular area. Due to fast speed and deep fading, some file packets might be lost during the vehicle-to-roadside broadcasting stage. In this paper, we propose a peer-to-peer (P2P) approach to allow the OBUs to exchange data and complement the missing packets. Specifically, we introduce a coalitional graph game to model the cooperation among OBUs and propose a coalition formation a…
Game theoretical techniques have recently become prevalent in many engineering applications, notably in communications. With the emergence of cooperation as a new communication paradigm, and the need for self-organizing, decentralized, and autonomic networks, it has become imperative to seek suitable game theoretical tools that allow to analyze and study the behavior and interactions of the nodes in future communication networks. In this context, this tutorial introduces the concepts of cooperative game theory, namely coalitional games, and their potential applications in communication and wir…
Cooperative transmission in vehicular networks is studied by using coalitional game and pricing in this paper. There are several vehicles and roadside units (RSUs) in the networks. Each vehicle has a desire to transmit with a certain probability, which represents its data burtiness. The RSUs can enhance the vehicles' transmissions by cooperatively relaying the vehicles' data. We consider two kinds of cooperations: cooperation among the vehicles and cooperation between the vehicle and RSU. First, vehicles cooperate to avoid interfering transmissions by scheduling the transmissions of the vehicl…
ShanghaiTech University（上海科技大学）；Ben-Gurion University of the Negev（内盖夫本-古里安大学）；Ariel University（阿里埃勒大学）
The research on coalitional games has focused on how to share the reward among a coalition such that players are incentivised to collaborate together. It assumes that the (deterministic or stochastic) characteristic function is known in advance. This paper studies a new setting (a task allocation problem) where the characteristic function is not known and it is controlled by some private information from the players. Hence, the challenge here is twofold: (i) incentivize players to reveal their private information truthfully, (ii) incentivize them to collaborate together. We show that existing …
We propose a notion of a stable partition in a coalitional game that is parametrized by the concept of a defection function. This function assigns to each partition of the grand coalition a set of different coalition arrangements for a group of defecting players. The alternatives are compared using their social welfare. We characterize the stability of a partition for a number of most natural defection functions and investigate whether and how so defined stable partitions can be reached from any initial partition by means of simple transformations. The approach is illustrated by analyzing an e…
This paper considers the problem of dividing agents among coalitions. We concentrate on Additively Separable Hedonic Games (ASHG's), in which each agent has a non-negative value for every other agent and her utility is the sum of the values she assigns to the members of her coalition. Unlike previous work, we analyze a model where exactly $k$ coalitions must be formed, and the goal is to maximize the utility of the agent which is worst off, i.e., the egalitarian social welfare. We show that this problem is hard, even when the number of agents should be equally divided among the coalitions. We …
We present a partial operator-theoretic characterization of approachability principle and based on this characterization, we interpret a particular distributed payoff allocation algorithm to be a sequence of time-varying paracontractions. Further, we also propose a distributed algorithm, under the context of coalitional game, on time-varying communication networks. The state in the proposed algorithm converges to a consensus within, the predefined, desired set. For convergence analysis, we rely on the operator-theoretic property of paracontraction.
Cooperative multihop communication can greatly increase network throughput, yet packet forwarding for other nodes involves opportunity and energy cost for relays. Thus one of the pre-requisite problems in the successful implementation of multihop transmission is how to foster cooperation among selfish nodes. Existing researches mainly adopt monetary stimulating. In this manuscript, we propose instead a simple and self-enforcing forwarding incentive scheme free of indirect monetary remunerating for asymmetric (uplink multihop, downlink single-hop) cellar network based on coalitional game theory…
In this paper we propose two novel coalitional game theory based optimization methods for minimizing the cost of electricity consumed by households from a smart community. Some households in the community may own renewable energy systems (RESs) conjoined with energy storing systems (ESSs). Some other residences own ESSs only, while the remaining households are simple energy consumers. We first propose a coalitional cost optimization method in which RESs and ESSs owners exchange energy and share their renewable energy and storage spaces. We show that by participating in the proposed game these …
Motivated by the markets operating on fast time scales, we present a framework for online coalitional games with time-varying coalitional values and propose real-time payoff distribution mechanisms. Specifically, we design two online distributed algorithms to track the Shapley value and the core, the two most widely studied payoff distribution criteria in coalitional game theory. We show that the payoff distribution trajectory resulting from our proposed algorithms converges to a neighborhood of the time-varying solutions. We adopt an operator-theoretic perspective to show the convergence of o…
We introduce and study a natural extension of the Alternating time temporal logic ATL, called Temporal Logic of Coalitional Goal Assignments (TLCGA). It features just one, but quite expressive, coalitional strategic operator, viz. the coalitional goal assignment operator, which is based on a mapping assigning to each set of players in the game its coalitional goal, formalised by a path formula of the language of TLCGA, i.e. a formula prefixed with a temporal operator X,U, or G, representing a temporalised objective for the respective coalition, describing the property of the plays on which tha…
In this paper, we propose a bilateral peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading scheme under single-contract and multi-contract market setups, both as an assignment game, and a special class of coalitional games. {The proposed market formulation allows for efficient computation of a market equilibrium while keeping the desired economic properties offered by the coalitional games. Furthermore, our market model allows buyers to have heterogeneous preferences (product differentiation) over the energy sellers, which can be economic, social, or environmental. To address the problem of scalability in coalit…
Device-to-Device (D2D) communications, which allow direct communication among mobile devices, have been proposed as an enabler of local services in 3GPP LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) cellular networks. This work investigates a hierarchical LTE-A network framework consisting of multiple D2D operators at the upper layer and a group of devices at the lower layer. We propose a cooperative model that allows the operators to improve their utility in terms of revenue by sharing their devices, and the devices to improve their payoff in terms of end-to-end throughput by collaboratively performing multi-path rou…
Microsoft Research（微软研究院）；University of Southampton（南安普顿大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Hebrew University（希伯来大学）；Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf（杜塞尔多夫海因里希·海涅大学）
A key question in cooperative game theory is that of coalitional stability, usually captured by the notion of the \emph{core}--the set of outcomes such that no subgroup of players has an incentive to deviate. However, some coalitional games have empty cores, and any outcome in such a game is unstable. In this paper, we investigate the possibility of stabilizing a coalitional game by using external payments. We consider a scenario where an external party, which is interested in having the players work together, offers a supplemental payment to the grand coalition (or, more generally, a particul…
In this paper, we study the problem of cooperative interference management in an OFDMA two-tier small cell network. In particular, we propose a novel approach for allowing the small cells to cooperate, so as to optimize their sum-rate, while cooperatively satisfying their maximum transmit power constraints. Unlike existing work which assumes that only disjoint groups of cooperative small cells can emerge, we formulate the small cells' cooperation problem as a coalition formation game with overlapping coalitions. In this game, each small cell base station can choose to participate in one or mor…
In this paper, the problem of random access contention between machine type devices (MTDs) in the uplink of a wireless cellular network is studied. In particular, the possibility of forming cooperative groups to coordinate the MTDs' requests for the random access channel (RACH) is analyzed. The problem is formulated as a stochastic coalition formation game in which the MTDs are the players that seek to form cooperative coalitions to optimize a utility function that captures each MTD's energy consumption and time-varying queue length. Within each coalition, an MTD acts as a coalition head that …
We propose in this paper a coinvestment plan between several stakeholders of different types, namely a physical network owner, operating network nodes, e.g. a network operator or a tower company, and a set of service providers willing to use these resources to provide services as video streaming, augmented reality, autonomous driving assistance, etc. One such scenario is that of deployment of Edge Computing resources. Indeed, although the latter technology is ready, the high Capital Expenditure (CAPEX) cost of such resources is the barrier to its deployment. For this reason, a solid economical…
This paper presents a logic of preference and functional dependence (LPFD) and its hybrid extension (HLPFD), both of whose sound and strongly complete axiomatization are provided. The decidability of LPFD is also proved. The application of LPFD and HLPFD to modelling cooperative games in strategic and coalitional forms is explored. The resulted framework provides a unified view on Nash equilibrium, Pareto optimality and the core. The philosophical relevance of these game-theoretical notions to discussions of collective agency is made explicit. Some key connections with other logics are also re…
Various peer-to-peer energy markets have emerged in recent years in an attempt to manage distributed energy resources in a more efficient way. One of the main challenges these models face is how to create and allocate incentives to participants. Cooperative game theory offers a methodology to financially reward prosumers based on their contributions made to the local energy coalition using the Shapley value, but its high computational complexity limits the size of the game. This paper explores a stratified sampling method proposed in existing literature for Shapley value estimation, and modifi…
This paper studies a significant problem in green networking called switching off base stations in case of cooperating service providers by means of stochastic geometric and coalitional game tools. The coalitional game herein considered is played by service providers who cooperate in switching off base stations. When they cooperate, any mobile is associated to the nearest BS of any service provider. Given a Poisson point process deployment model of nodes over an area and switching off base stations with some probability, it is proved that the distribution of signal to interference plus noise r…
Cooperation between wireless network nodes is a promising technique for improving the physical layer security of wireless transmission, in terms of secrecy capacity, in the presence of multiple eavesdroppers. While existing physical layer security literature answered the question "what are the link-level secrecy capacity gains from cooperation?", this paper attempts to answer the question of "how to achieve those gains in a practical decentralized wireless network and in the presence of a secrecy capacity cost for information exchange?". For this purpose, we model the physical layer security c…
In this work we study of competitive situations among users of a set of global resources. More precisely we study the effect of cost policies used by these resources in the convergence time to a pure Nash equilibrium. The work is divided in two parts. In the theoretical part we prove lower and upper bounds on the convergence time for various cost policies. We then implement all the models we study and provide some experimental results. These results follows the theoretical with one exception which is the most interesting among the experiments. In the case of coalitional users the theoretical u…
A wireless relay network (WRN) has recently emerged as an effective way to increase communication capacity and extend a coverage area with a low cost. In the WRN, multiple service providers (SPs) can cooperate to share their resources (e.g., relay nodes and spectrum), to achieve higher utility in terms of revenue. Such cooperation can improve the capacity of the WRN, and thus throughput for terminal devices (TDs). However, this cooperation can be realized only if fair allocation of aggregated utility, which is the sum of the utility of all the cooperative SPs, can be achieved. In this paper, w…
Coalition formation is a key topic in multi-agent systems. Coalitions enable agents to achieve goals that they may not have been able to achieve on their own. Previous work has shown problems in coalitional games to be computationally hard. Wooldridge and Dunne (Artificial Intelligence 2006) studied the classical computational complexity of several natural decision problems in Coalitional Resource Games (CRG) - games in which each agent is endowed with a set of resources and coalitions can bring about a set of goals if they are collectively endowed with the necessary amount of resources. The i…
The Banzhaf index, Shapley-Shubik index and other voting power indices measure the importance of a player in a coalitional game. We consider a simple coalitional game called the spanning connectivity game (SCG) based on an undirected, unweighted multigraph, where edges are players. We examine the computational complexity of computing the voting power indices of edges in the SCG. It is shown that computing Banzhaf values and Shapley-Shubik indices is #P-complete for SCGs. Interestingly, Holler indices and Deegan-Packel indices can be computed in polynomial time. Among other results, it is prove…
This paper shows that the PoA in non-atomic congestion games is H{ö}lder continuous w.r.t. combined disturbance on cost functions and demands. We then apply this result to the convergence analysis of the PoA.
We study a new class of games which generalizes congestion games and its bottleneck variant. We introduce congestion games with mixed objectives to model network scenarios in which players seek to optimize for latency and bandwidths alike. We characterize the existence of pure Nash equilibria (PNE) and the convergence of improvement dynamics. For games that do not possess PNE we give bounds on the approximation ratio of approximate pure Nash equilibria.
We put forward a new model of congestion games where agents have uncertainty over the routes used by other agents. We take a non-probabilistic approach, assuming that each agent knows that the number of agents using an edge is within a certain range. Given this uncertainty, we model agents who either minimize their worst-case cost (WCC) or their worst-case regret (WCR), and study implications on equilibrium existence, convergence through adaptive play, and efficiency. Under the WCC behavior the game reduces to a modified congestion game, and welfare improves when agents have moderate uncertain…
We revisit the coalition structure generation problem in which the goal is to partition the players into exhaustive and disjoint coalitions so as to maximize the social welfare. One of our key results is a general polynomial-time algorithm to solve the problem for all coalitional games provided that player types are known and the number of player types is bounded by a constant. As a corollary, we obtain a polynomial-time algorithm to compute an optimal partition for weighted voting games with a constant number of weight values and for coalitional skill games with a constant number of skills. W…
This paper studies strategic decentralization in binary choice composite network congestion games. A player decentralizes if she lets some autonomous agents to decide respectively how to send different parts of her stock from the origin to the destination. This paper shows that, with convex, strictly increasing and differentiable arc cost functions, an atomic splittable player always has an optimal unilateral decentralization strategy. Besides, unilateral decentralization gives her the same advantage as being the leader in a Stackelberg congestion game. Finally, unilateral decentralization of …
In this paper, we present and analyze the properties of a new class of games - the spatial congestion game (SCG), which is a generalization of the classical congestion game (CG). In a classical congestion game, multiple users share the same set of resources and a user's payoff for using any resource is a function of the total number of users sharing it. As a potential game, this game enjoys some very appealing properties, including the existence of a pure strategy Nash equilibrium (NE) and that every improvement path is finite and leads to such a NE (also called the finite improvement property…
Computing an equilibrium in congestion games can be challenging when the number of players is large. Yet, it is a problem to be addressed in practice, for instance to forecast the state of the system and be able to control it. In this work, we analyze the case of generalized atomic congestion games, with coupling constraints, and with players that are heterogeneous through their action sets and their utility functions. We obtain an approximation of the variational Nash equilibria---a notion generalizing Nash equilibria in the presence of coupling constraints---of a large atomic congestion game…
The Shapley value is one of the most important solution concepts in cooperative game theory. In coalitional games without externalities, it allows to compute a unique payoff division that meets certain desirable fairness axioms. However, in many realistic applications where externalities are present, Shapley's axioms fail to indicate such a unique division. Consequently, there are many extensions of Shapley value to the environment with externalities proposed in the literature built upon additional axioms. Two important such extensions are "externality-free" value by Pham Do and Norde and valu…
We describe a new coordination mechanism for non-atomic congestion games that leads to a (selfish) social cost which is arbitrarily close to the non-selfish optimal. This mechanism does not incur any additional extra cost, like tolls, which are usually differentiated from the social cost as expressed in terms of delays only.
We consider coalition formation among players in an n-player finite strategic game over infinite horizon. At each time a randomly formed coalition makes a joint deviation from a current action profile such that at new action profile all players from the coalition are strictly benefited. Such deviations define a coalitional better-response (CBR) dynamics that is in general stochastic. The CBR dynamics either converges to a strong Nash equilibrium or stucks in a closed cycle. We also assume that at each time a selected coalition makes mistake in deviation with small probability that add mutation…
The class of exact transferable utility coalitional games, introduced in 1972 by Schmeidler, has been studied both in the context of game theory and in the context of imprecise probabilities. We characterize the cone of exact games by describing the minimal set of linear inequalities defining this cone; these facet-defining inequalities for the exact cone appear to correspond to certain set systems (= systems of coalitions). We noticed that non-empty proper coalitions having non-zero coefficients in these facet-defining inequalities form set systems with particular properties. More specificall…
TU Dortmund（多特蒙德工业大学）；University of Bonn（波恩大学）；University Hospital of Bonn（波恩大学医院）
Not all real-world data are labeled, and when labels are not available, it is often costly to obtain them. Moreover, as many algorithms suffer from the curse of dimensionality, reducing the features in the data to a smaller set is often of great utility. Unsupervised feature selection aims to reduce the number of features, often using feature importance scores to quantify the relevancy of single features to the task at hand. These scores can be based only on the distribution of variables and the quantification of their interactions. The previous literature, mainly investigating anomaly detecti…
We study the impact of player capability on social welfare in congestion games. We introduce a new game, the Distance-bounded Network Congestion game (DNC), as the basis of our study. DNC is a symmetric network congestion game with a bound on the number of edges each player can use. We show that DNC is PLS-complete in contrast to standard symmetric network congestion games which are in P. To model different player capabilities, we propose using programs in a Domain-Specific Language (DSL) to compactly represent player strategies. We define a player's capability as the maximum size of the progr…
Coalitional voting games appear in different forms in multi-agent systems, social choice and threshold logic. In this paper, the complexity of comparison of influence between players in coalitional voting games is characterized. The possible representations of simple games considered are simple games represented by winning coalitions, minimal winning coalitions, weighted voting game or a multiple weighted voting game. The influence of players is gauged from the viewpoint of basic player types, desirability relations and classical power indices such as Shapley-Shubik index, Banzhaf index, Holle…
