We study the extent to which decentralized cost-sharing protocols can achieve good price of anarchy (PoA) bounds in network cost-sharing games with $n$ agents. We focus on the model of resource-aware protocols, where the designer has prior access to the network structure and can also increase the total cost of an edge(overcharging), and we study classes of games with concave or convex cost functions. We first consider concave cost functions and our main result is a cost-sharing protocol for symmetric games on directed acyclic graphs that achieves a PoA of $2+\varepsilon$ for some arbitrary small positive $\varepsilon$, which improves to $1+\varepsilon$ for games with at least two players. We also achieve a PoA of 1 for series-parallel graphs and show that no protocol can achieve a PoA better than $Ω(\sqrt{n})$ for multicast games. We then also consider convex cost functions and prove analogous results for series-parallel networks and multicast games, as well as a lower bound of $Ω(n)$ for the PoA on directed acyclic graphs without the use of overcharging.
In this study, we formulate positive and negative externalities caused by changes in the supply of shared vehicles as ride sharing games. The study aims to understand the price of anarchy (PoA) and its improvement via a coordination technique in ride sharing games. A critical question is whether ride sharing games exhibit a pure Nash equilibrium (pNE) since the PoA bound assumes it. Our result shows a sufficient condition for a ride sharing game to have a finite improvement property and a pNE similar to potential games. This is the first step to analyze PoA bound and its improvement by coordin…
Sharing unused vehicles is one practical solution for traffic congestion. We propose an advanced vehicle-sharing service that maximizes the sharing of vehicles and improves traffic efficiency by coordinating user trips via an information system. We formulate ride-sharing games that model externalities in vehicle sharing caused by insufficient vehicle supply. We show how Bayes correlated equilibrium can coordinate players in ride-sharing games and verify the resultant improvement in the price of anarchy.
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…
The cost-sharing connection game is a variant of routing games on a network. In this model, given a directed graph with edge costs and edge capacities, each agent wants to construct a path from a source to a sink with low cost. The users share the cost of each edge based on a cost-sharing function. One of the simple cost-sharing functions is defined as the cost divided by the number of users. Most of the previous papers about cost-sharing connection games addressed this cost-sharing function. It models an ideal setting where no overhead arises when people share things, though it might be quite…
This paper develops a game-theoretic framework for the design and analysis of a new class of incentive schemes called intervention schemes. We formulate intervention games, propose a solution concept of intervention equilibrium, and prove its existence in a finite intervention game. We apply our framework to resource sharing scenarios in wireless communications, whose non-cooperative outcomes without intervention yield suboptimal performance. We derive analytical results and analyze illustrative examples in the cases of imperfect and perfect monitoring. In the case of imperfect monitoring, int…
We model the interaction of several radio devices aiming to obtain wireless connectivity by using a set of base stations (BS) as a non-cooperative game. Each radio device aims to maximize its own spectral efficiency (SE) in two different scenarios: First, we let each player to use a unique BS (BS selection) and second, we let them to simultaneously use several BSs (BS Sharing). In both cases, we show that the resulting game is an exact potential game. We found that the BS selection game posses multiple Nash equilibria (NE) while the BS sharing game posses a unique one. We provide fully decentr…
An important task in the analysis of multiagent systems is to understand how groups of selfish players can form coalitions, i.e., work together in teams. In this paper, we study the dynamics of coalition formation under bounded rationality. We consider settings where each team's profit is given by a convex function, and propose three profit-sharing schemes, each of which is based on the concept of marginal utility. The agents are assumed to be myopic, i.e., they keep changing teams as long as they can increase their payoff by doing so. We study the properties (such as closeness to Nash equilib…
We consider a model of priced resource sharing that combines both queueing behavior and strategic behavior. We study a priority service model where a single server allocates its capacity to agents in proportion to their payment to the system, and users from different classes act to minimize the sum of their cost for processing delay and payment. As the exact processing time of this system is hard to compute, we introduce the notion of heavy traffic equilibrium as an approximation of the Nash equilibrium, derived by considering the asymptotic regime where the system load approaches capacity. We…
In cost sharing games, the existence and efficiency of pure Nash equilibria fundamentally depends on the method that is used to share the resources' costs. We consider a general class of resource allocation problems in which a set of resources is used by a heterogeneous set of selfish users. The cost of a resource is a (non-decreasing) function of the set of its users. Under the assumption that the costs of the resources are shared by uniform cost sharing protocols, i.e., protocols that use only local information of the resource's cost structure and its users to determine the cost shares, we e…
Thanks to the rapid development of information technology, the size of the wireless network becomes larger and larger, which makes spectrum resources more precious than ever before. To improve the efficiency of spectrum utilization, game theory has been applied to study the spectrum sharing in wireless networks for a long time. However, the scale of wireless network in existing studies is relatively small. In this paper, we introduce a novel game and model the spectrum sharing problem as an aggregative game for large-scale, heterogeneous, and dynamic networks. The massive usage of spectrum als…
Mobile edge computing seeks to provide resources to different delay-sensitive applications. However, allocating the limited edge resources to a number of applications is a challenging problem. To alleviate the resource scarcity problem, we propose sharing of resources among multiple edge computing service providers where each service provider has a particular utility to optimize. We model the resource allocation and sharing problem as a multi-objective optimization problem and present a \emph{Cooperative Game Theory} (CGT) based framework, where each edge service provider first satisfies its n…
We propose and analyze a dynamic implementation of the property-rights model of cognitive radio. A primary link has the possibility to lease the owned spectrum to a MAC network of secondary nodes, in exchange for cooperation in the form of distributed space-time coding (DSTC). The cooperation and competition between the primary and secondary network are cast in the framework of sequential game. On one hand, the primary link attempts to maximize its quality of service in terms of signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR); on the other hand, nodes in the secondary network compete for transm…
We propose a generic strategic network resource sharing game between a set of players representing operators. The players negotiate which sets of players share given resources, serving users with varying sensitivity to interference. We prove that the proposed game has a Nash equilibrium, to which a greedily played game converges. Furthermore, simulation results show that, when applied to inter-operator spectrum sharing in small-cell indoor office environment, the convergence is fast and there is a significant performance improvement for the operators when compared to the default resource usage…
Wireless secret sharing is crucial to information security in the era of Internet of Things. One method is to utilize the effect of the randomness of the wireless channel in the data link layer to generate the common secret between two legitimate users Alice and Bob. This paper studies this secret sharing mechanism from the perspective of game theory. In particular, we formulate a non-cooperative zero-sum game between the legitimate users and an eavesdropper Eve. In a symmetrical game where Eve has the same probability of successfully receiving a packet from Alice and Bob when the transmission…
In this paper we consider an extension to the classical definition of congestion games (CG) in which multiple users share the same set of resources and their payoff for using any resource is a function of the total number of users sharing it. The classical congestion games enjoy some very appealing properties, including the existence of a Nash equilibrium and that every improvement path is finite and leads to such a NE (also called the finite improvement property or FIP), which is also a local optimum to a potential function. On the other hand, this class of games does not model well the conge…
In this paper we consider strategic cost sharing games with so-called arbitrary sharing based on various combinatorial optimization problems, such as vertex and set cover, facility location, and network design problems. We concentrate on the existence and computational complexity of strong equilibria, in which no coalition can improve the cost of each of its members. Our main result reveals a connection between strong equilibrium in strategic games and the core in traditional coalitional cost sharing games studied in economics. For set cover and facility location games this results in a tight …
A new game theoretical solution concept for open spectrum sharing in cognitive radio (CR) environments is presented, the Lorenz equilibrium (LE). Both Nash and Pareto solution concepts have limitations when applied to real world problems. Nash equilibrium (NE) rarely ensures maximal payoff and it is frequently Pareto inefficient. The Pareto set is usually a large set of solutions, often too hard to process. The Lorenz equilibrium is a subset of Pareto efficient solutions that are equitable for all players and ensures a higher payoff than the Nash equilibrium. LE induces a selection criterion o…
We consider how selfish agents are likely to share revenues derived from maintaining connectivity between important network servers. We model a network where a failure of one node may disrupt communication between other nodes as a cooperative game called the vertex Connectivity Game (CG). In this game, each agent owns a vertex, and controls all the edges going to and from that vertex. A coalition of agents wins if it fully connects a certain subset of vertices in the graph, called the primary vertices. Power indices measure an agents ability to affect the outcome of the game. We show that in o…
We investigate the coexistence of an age optimizing network (AON) and a throughput optimizing network (TON) that share a common spectrum band. We consider two modes of long run coexistence: (a) networks compete with each other for spectrum access, causing them to interfere and (b) networks cooperate to achieve non-interfering access. To model competition, we define a non-cooperative stage game parameterized by the average age of the AON at the beginning of the stage, derive its mixed strategy Nash equilibrium (MSNE), and analyze the evolution of age and throughput over an infinitely repeated g…
Mobile Edge Caching is a promising technique to enhance the content delivery quality and reduce the backhaul link congestion, by storing popular content at the network edge or mobile devices (e.g. base stations and smartphones) that are proximate to content requesters. In this work, we study a novel mobile edge caching framework, which enables mobile devices to cache and share popular contents with each other via device-to-device (D2D) links. We are interested in the following incentive problem of mobile device users: whether and which users are willing to cache and share what contents, taking…
We consider private commons for secondary sharing of licensed spectrum bands with no access coordination provided by the primary license holder. In such environments, heterogeneity in demand patterns of the secondary users can lead to constant changes in the interference levels, and thus can be a source of volatility to the utilities of the users. In this paper, we consider secondary users to be service providers that provide downlink services. We formulate the spectrum sharing problem as a non-cooperative iterated game of power control where service providers change their power levels to fix …
Ride-sharing services are gaining popularity and are crucial for a sustainable environment. A special case in which such services are most applicable, is the last mile variant. In this variant it is assumed that all the passengers are positioned at the same origin location (e.g. an airport), and each have a different destination. One of the major issues in a shared ride is fairly splitting of the ride cost among the passengers. In this paper we use the Shapley value, which is one of the most significant solution concepts in cooperative game theory, for fairly splitting the cost of a shared rid…
We propose a public goods game model of user sharing in an online commenting forum. In particular, we assume that users who share personal information incur an information cost but reap the benefits of a more extensive social interaction. Freeloaders benefit from the same social interaction but do not share personal information. The resulting public goods structure is analyzed both theoretically and empirically. In particular, we show that the proposed game always possesses equilibria and we give sufficient conditions for pure strategy equilibria to emerge. These correspond to users who always…
We introduce a novel framework to model limited lookahead in congestion games. Intuitively, the players enter the game sequentially and choose an optimal action under the assumption that the $k-1$ subsequent players play subgame-perfectly. Our model naturally interpolates between outcomes of greedy best-response ($k=1$) and subgame-perfect outcomes ($k=n$, the number of players). We study the impact of limited lookahead (parameterized by $k$) on the stability and inefficiency of the resulting outcomes. As our results reveal, increased lookahead does not necessarily lead to better outcomes; in …
We consider the decentralized power allocation and spectrum sharing problem in multi-user, multi-channel systems with strategic users. We present a mechanism/game form that has the following desirable features. (1) It is individually rational. (2) It is budget balanced at every Nash equilibrium of the game induced by the game form as well as off equilibrium. (3) The allocation corresponding to every Nash equilibrium (NE) of the game induced by the mechanism is a Lindahl allocation, that is a weakly Pareto optimal allocation. Our proposed game form/mechanism achieves all the above desirable pro…
To ensure that social networks (e.g. opinion consensus, cooperative estimation, distributed learning and adaptation etc.) proliferate and efficiently operate, the participating agents need to collaborate with each other by repeatedly sharing information. However, sharing information is often costly for the agents while resulting in no direct immediate benefit for them. Hence, lacking incentives to collaborate, strategic agents who aim to maximize their own individual utilities will withhold rather than share information, leading to inefficient operation or even collapse of networks. In this pa…
ICMAT-CSIC（马德里数学科学研究所-西班牙国家研究委员会）；The Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute (SAMSI)（统计与应用数学科学研究所）；School of Management, USST（上海理工大学管理学院）；IBM ILBD（IBM 国际商业机器公司ILBD部门）
Data sharing issues pervade online social and economic environments. To foster social progress, it is important to develop models of the interaction between data producers and consumers that can promote the rise of cooperation between the involved parties. We formalize this interaction as a game, the data sharing game, based on the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma and deal with it through multi-agent reinforcement learning techniques. We consider several strategies for how the citizens may behave, depending on the degree of centralization sought. Simulations suggest mechanisms for cooperation to ta…
We introduce a game-theoretic framework to ex- plore revenue sharing in an Edge-Cloud computing system, in which computing service providers at the edge of the Internet (edge providers) and computing service providers at the cloud (cloud providers) co-exist and collectively provide computing resources to clients (e.g., end users or applications) at the edge. Different from traditional cloud computing, the providers in an Edge-Cloud system are independent and self-interested. To achieve high system-level efficiency, the manager of the system adopts a task distribution mechanism to maximize the …
Global games form a subclass of games with incomplete information where a set of agents decide actions against a regime with an underlying fundamental $θ$ representing its power. Each agent has access to an independent noisy observation of $θ$. In order to capture the behavior of agents in a social network of information exchange we assume that agents share their observation in a noisy environment prior to making their decision. We show that global games with noisy sharing of information do not admit an intuitive type of threshold policy which only depends on agents' belief about the underlyin…
We consider the problem of cooperative spectrum sharing among a primary user (PU) and multiple secondary users (SUs) under quality of service (QoS) constraints. The SUs network is controlled by the PU through a relay which gets a revenue for amplifying and forwarding the SUs signals to their respective destinations. The relay charges each SU a different price depending on its received signal-to-interference and-noise ratio (SINR). The relay can control the SUs network and maximize any desired PU utility function. The PU utility function represents its rate, which is affected by the SUs access,…
We study multi-hop broadcast in wireless networks with one source node and multiple receiving nodes. The message flow from the source to the receivers can be modeled as a tree-graph, called broadcast-tree. The problem of finding the minimum-power broadcast-tree (MPBT) is NP-complete. Unlike most of the existing centralized approaches, we propose a decentralized algorithm, based on a non-cooperative cost-sharing game. In this game, every receiving node, as a player, chooses another node of the network as its respective transmitting node for receiving the message. Consequently, a cost is assigne…
User-generated content can be distributed at a low cost using peer-to-peer (P2P) networks, but the free-rider problem hinders the utilization of P2P networks. In order to achieve an efficient use of P2P networks, we investigate fundamental issues on incentives in content production and sharing using game theory. We build a basic model to analyze non-cooperative outcomes without an incentive scheme and then use different game formulations derived from the basic model to examine five incentive schemes: cooperative, payment, repeated interaction, intervention, and enforced full sharing. The resul…
This paper considers information sharing in a multi-player repeated game. Every round, each player observes a subset of components of a random vector and then takes a control action. The utility earned by each player depends on the full random vector and on the actions of others. An example is a game where different rewards are placed over multiple locations, each player only knows the rewards in a subset of the locations, and players compete to collect the rewards. Sharing information can help others, but can also increase competition for desirable locations. Standard Nash equilibrium and cor…
The use of game theoretic methods for control in multiagent systems has been an important topic in recent research. Valid utility games in particular have been used to model real-world problems; such games have the convenient property that the value of any decision set which is a Nash equilibrium of the game is guaranteed to be within 1/2 of the value of the optimal decision set. However, an implicit assumption in this guarantee is that each agent is aware of the decisions of all other agents. In this work, we first describe how this guarantee degrades as agents are only aware of a subset of t…
Solving Hierarchical Information-Sharing Dec-POMDPs: An Extensive-Form Game Approach
Université de Lyon（里昂大学）；INSA Lyon（里昂国立应用科学学院）；Inria（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；Université de Lorraine（洛林大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Bernoulli Institute（伯努利研究所）；University of Groningen（格罗宁根大学）
The Sharing Economy (which includes Airbnb, Apple, Alibaba, Uber, WeWork, Ebay, Didi Chuxing, Amazon) blossomed across the world, triggered structural changes in industries and significantly affected international capital flows primarily by disobeying a wide variety of statutes and laws in many countries. They also illegally reduced and changing the nature of competition in many industries often to the detriment of social welfare. This article develops new dynamic pricing models for the SEOs and derives some stability properties of mixed games and dynamic algorithms which eliminate antitrust l…
Cooperative game theory deals with systems where players want to cooperate to improve their payoffs. But players may choose coalitions in a non-cooperative manner, leading to a coalition-formation game. We consider such a game with several players (willing to cooperate) and an adamant player (unwilling to cooperate) involved in resource-sharing. Here, the strategy of a player is the set of players with whom it wants to form a coalition. Given a strategy profile, an appropriate partition of coalitions is formed; players in each coalition maximize their collective utilities leading to a non-coop…
The Massive Ordnance Penetrator(MOP) has been developed to destroy deeply buried nuclear components by controlled release from a B2 or B52 airplane. This type of release must be cockpit software controlled by the Tactical Optimal Strategy Game(TOSG) Protocol to optimally determine the war game aspects of the dueling from other countries' MOP releases, and the depth at which the MOP explosions can occur for maximal safety and risk concerns. The TOSG Protocol characteristics of games of strategy, games of optimal strategy and tactical games are defined initially by the game of strategy as a cert…
Population protocols have been introduced by Angluin et {al.} as a model of networks consisting of very limited mobile agents that interact in pairs but with no control over their own movement. A collection of anonymous agents, modeled by finite automata, interact pairwise according to some rules that update their states. The model has been considered as a computational model in several papers. Input values are initially distributed among the agents, and the agents must eventually converge to the the correct output. Predicates on the initial configurations that can be computed by such protocol…
In this paper, we study a problem where multiple operators (OPs) need to share a common pool of spectrum with each other. Our objective is to maximize the social welfare, defined as the overall weighted sum rate of the OPs. The problem is decomposed into two parts: the first part is to allocate RBs to OPs, which we do so by extending the framework of many-to-one matching game with externalities. The second part is to allocate power of small cell base stations (SBSs) belonging to each OP, which is accomplished using reinforcement learning. Assuming that the SBSs associated with each OPs are spa…
The focus of the iWIGP workshop is the interrelation between interactions, games and protocols. How does computer science deal with nondeterministic interactions where the actions a system takes are not (completely) determined by the interactions the system is involved in? In computer science, nondeterministic interactions are usually described by protocols. However, these interactions can also be viewed as games. As to be expected, games have become an increasingly important modeling tool wherever nondeterministic interactions are involved -- from foundations in game semantics and reactive sy…
With the advance of complex large-scale networks, it is becoming increasingly important to understand how selfish and spatially distributed individuals will share network resources without centralized coordinations. In this paper, we introduce the graphical congestion game with weighted edges (GCGWE) as a general theoretical model to study this problem. In GCGWE, we view the players as vertices in a weighted graph. The amount of negative impact (e.g. congestion) caused by two close-by players to each other is determined by the weight of the edge linking them. The GCGWE unifies and significantl…
Today's wireless networks are increasingly crowded with an explosion of wireless users, who have greater and more diverse quality of service (QoS) demands than ever before. However, the amount of spectrum that can be used to satisfy these demands remains finite. This leads to a great challenge for wireless users to effectively share the spectrum to achieve their QoS requirements. This paper presents a game theoretic model for spectrum sharing, where users seek to satisfy their QoS demands in a distributed fashion. Our spectrum sharing model is quite general, because we allow different wireless…
Co-Investment with Payoff-Sharing Mechanism for Cooperative Decision-Making in Network Design Games
Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control, ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院动态系统与控制研究所）；Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems, Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院信息与决策系统实验室）
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…
In this paper, a novel framework for normative modeling of the spectrum sensing and sharing problem in cognitive radios (CRs) as a transferable utility (TU) cooperative game is proposed. Secondary users (SUs) jointly sense the spectrum and cooperatively detect the primary user (PU) activity for identifying and accessing unoccupied spectrum bands. The games are designed to be balanced and super-additive so that resource allocation is possible and provides SUs with an incentive to cooperate and form the grand coalition. The characteristic function of the game is derived based on the worths of SU…
In cost sharing games with delays, a set of agents jointly allocates a finite subset of resources. Each resource has a fixed cost that has to be shared by the players, and each agent has a nonshareable player-specific delay for each resource. A prominent example is uncapacitated facility location (UFL), where facilities need to be opened (at a shareable cost) and clients want to connect to opened facilities. Each client pays a cost share and his non-shareable physical connection cost. Given any profile of subsets allocated by the agents, a separable cost sharing protocol determines cost shares…
This volume contains the proceedings of the second International Workshop on Interactions, Games and Protocols (IWIGP 2012). The workshop was held in Tallinn on March 25, 2012, as a satellite event of ETAPS 2012. The previous workshop took place in Saarbrücken as part of ETAPS 2011. The goal of this workshop was to bring researchers from industry and academia together and to explore how a better understanding of the interrelation between interactions, games and protocols leads to better-designed and more reliable interacting systems. We invited scientific contributions both from a theoretical …
This paper investigates repeated win-lose coordination games (WLC-games). We analyse which protocols are optimal for these games covering both the worst case and average case scenarios, i,e., optimizing the guaranteed and expected coordination times. We begin by analysing Choice Matching Games (CM-games) which are a simple yet fundamental type of WLC-games, where the goal of the players is to pick the same choice from a finite set of initially indistinguishable choices. We give a complete classification of optimal expected and guaranteed coordination times in two-player CM-games and show that …
High performance machine learning models have become highly dependent on the availability of large quantity and quality of training data. To achieve this, various central agencies such as the government have suggested for different data providers to pool their data together to learn a unified predictive model, which performs better. However, these providers are usually profit-driven and would only agree to participate inthe data sharing process if the process is deemed both profitable and fair for themselves. Due to the lack of existing literature, it is unclear whether a fair and stable outco…
