• arXiv.cs.GT Pub Date : 2020-01-17
Yunlong Lu; Kai Yan

Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved outstanding results in recent years, which has led a dramatic increase in the number of methods and applications. Recent works are exploring learning beyond single-agent scenarios and considering multi-agent scenarios. However, they are faced with lots of challenges and are seeking for help from traditional game-theoretic algorithms, which, in turn, show bright application promise combined with modern algorithms and boosting computing power. In this survey, we first introduce basic concepts and algorithms in single agent RL and multi-agent systems; then, we summarize the related algorithms from three aspects. Solution concepts from game theory give inspiration to algorithms which try to evaluate the agents or find better solutions in multi-agent systems. Fictitious self-play becomes popular and has a great impact on the algorithm of multi-agent reinforcement learning. Counterfactual regret minimization is an important tool to solve games with incomplete information, and has shown great strength when combined with deep learning.

更新日期：2020-01-22
• arXiv.cs.GT Pub Date : 2020-01-18
Aritra Ghosh; Saayan Mitra; Somdeb Sarkhel; Jason Xie; Gang Wu; Viswanathan Swaminathan

In programmatic advertising, ad slots are usually sold using second-price (SP) auctions in real-time. The highest bidding advertiser wins but pays only the second-highest bid (known as the winning price). In SP, for a single item, the dominant strategy of each bidder is to bid the true value from the bidder's perspective. However, in a practical setting, with budget constraints, bidding the true value is a sub-optimal strategy. Hence, to devise an optimal bidding strategy, it is of utmost importance to learn the winning price distribution accurately. Moreover, a demand-side platform (DSP), which bids on behalf of advertisers, observes the winning price if it wins the auction. For losing auctions, DSPs can only treat its bidding price as the lower bound for the unknown winning price. In literature, typically censored regression is used to model such partially observed data. A common assumption in censored regression is that the winning price is drawn from a fixed variance (homoscedastic) uni-modal distribution (most often Gaussian). However, in reality, these assumptions are often violated. We relax these assumptions and propose a heteroscedastic fully parametric censored regression approach, as well as a mixture density censored network. Our approach not only generalizes censored regression but also provides flexibility to model arbitrarily distributed real-world data. Experimental evaluation on the publicly available dataset for winning price estimation demonstrates the effectiveness of our method. Furthermore, we evaluate our algorithm on one of the largest demand-side platforms and significant improvement has been achieved in comparison with the baseline solutions.

更新日期：2020-01-22
• arXiv.cs.GT Pub Date : 2020-01-19
Reza Alijani; Siddhartha Banerjee; Sreenivas Gollapudi; Kamesh Munagala; Kangning Wang

We consider the problem of selling perishable items to a stream of buyers in order to maximize social welfare. A seller starts with a set of identical items, and each arriving buyer wants any one item, and has a valuation drawn i.i.d. from a known distribution. Each item, however, disappears after an a priori unknown amount of time that we term the horizon for that item. The seller knows the (possibly different) distribution of the horizon for each item, but not its realization till the item actually disappears. As with the classic prophet inequalities, the goal is to design an online pricing scheme that competes with the prophet that knows the horizon and extracts full social surplus (or welfare). Our main results are for the setting where items have independent horizon distributions satisfying the monotone-hazard-rate (MHR) condition. Here, for any number of items, we achieve a constant-competitive bound via a conceptually simple policy that balances the rate at which buyers are accepted with the rate at which items are removed from the system. We implement this policy via a novel technique of matching via probabilistically simulating departures of the items at future times. Moreover, for a single item and MHR horizon distribution with mean $\mu$, we show a tight result: There is a fixed pricing scheme that has competitive ratio at most $2 - 1/\mu$, and this is the best achievable in this class. We further show that our results are best possible. First, we show that the competitive ratio is unbounded without the MHR assumption even for one item. Further, even when the horizon distributions are i.i.d. MHR and the number of items becomes large, the competitive ratio of any policy is lower bounded by a constant greater than $1$, which is in sharp contrast to the setting with identical deterministic horizons.

更新日期：2020-01-22
• arXiv.cs.GT Pub Date : 2020-01-20
Bin Li; Dong Hao; Dengji Zhao

Diffusion auction is a new model in auction design. It can incentivize the buyers who have already joined in the auction to further diffuse the sale information to others via social relations, whereby both the seller's revenue and the social welfare can be improved. Diffusion auctions are essentially non-typical multidimensional mechanism design problems and agents' social relations are complicatedly involved with their bids. In such auctions, incentive-compatibility (IC) means it is best for every agent to honestly report her valuation and fully diffuse the sale information to all her neighbors. Existing work identified some specific mechanisms for diffusion auctions, while a general theory characterizing all incentive-compatible diffusion auctions is still missing. In this work, we identify a sufficient and necessary condition for all dominant-strategy incentive-compatible (DSIC) diffusion auctions. We formulate the monotonic allocation policies in such multidimensional problems and show that any monotonic allocation policy can be implemented in a DSIC diffusion auction mechanism. Moreover, given any monotonic allocation policy, we obtain the optimal payment policy to maximize the seller's revenue.

更新日期：2020-01-22
• arXiv.cs.GT Pub Date : 2020-01-20
Indu Yadav; Ankur A. Kulkarni; Abhay Karandikar

To address the exponentially increasing data rate demands of end users, necessitates efficient spectrum allocation among co-existing operators in licensed and unlicensed spectrum bands to cater to the temporal and spatial variations of traffic in the wireless network. In this paper, we address the spectrum allocation problem among non-cooperative operators via auctions. The classical Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) approach provides the framework for a strategy-proof and social welfare maximizing auction at high computational complexity, which makes it infeasible for practical implementation. We propose sealed bid auction mechanisms for spectrum allocation which are computationally tractable and hence applicable for allocating spectrum by performing auctions in short durations as per the dynamic load variations of the network. We establish that the proposed algorithm is strategy-proof for uniform demand. Furthermore, for non-uniform demand we propose an algorithm that satisfies weak strategy-proofness. We also consider non-linear increase in the marginal valuations with demand. Simulation results are presented to exhibit the performance comparison of the proposed algorithms with VCG and other existing mechanisms.

更新日期：2020-01-22
• arXiv.cs.GT Pub Date : 2016-04-01
Nuh Aygün Dalkıran; Serdar Yüksel

Through a stochastic control theoretic approach, we analyze reputation games where a strategic long-lived player acts in a sequential repeated game against a collection of short-lived players. The key assumption in our model is that the information of the short-lived players is nested in that of the long-lived player. This nested information structure is obtained through an appropriate monitoring structure. Under this monitoring structure, we show that, given mild assumptions, the set of Perfect Bayesian Equilibrium payoffs coincide with Markov Perfect Equilibrium payoffs, and hence a dynamic programming formulation can be obtained for the computation of equilibrium strategies of the strategic long-lived player in the discounted setup. We also consider the undiscounted average-payoff setup where we obtain an optimal equilibrium strategy of the strategic long-lived player under further technical conditions. We then use this optimal strategy in the undiscounted setup as a tool to obtain a tight upper payoff bound for the arbitrarily patient long-lived player in the discounted setup. Finally, by using measure concentration techniques, we obtain a refined lower payoff bound on the value of reputation in the discounted setup. We also study the continuity of equilibrium payoffs in the prior beliefs.

更新日期：2020-01-22
• arXiv.cs.GT Pub Date : 2018-01-06
Krishna Dasaratha; Benjamin Golub; Nir Hak

Agents learn about a changing state using private signals and past actions of neighbors in a network. We characterize equilibrium learning and social influence in this setting. We then examine when agents can aggregate information well, responding quickly to recent changes. A key sufficient condition for good aggregation is that each individual's neighbors have sufficiently different types of private information. In contrast, when signals are homogeneous, aggregation is suboptimal on any network. We also examine behavioral versions of the model, and show that achieving good aggregation requires a sophisticated understanding of correlations in neighbors' actions. The model provides a Bayesian foundation for a tractable learning dynamic in networks, closely related to the DeGroot model, and offers new tools for counterfactual and welfare analyses.

更新日期：2020-01-22
• arXiv.cs.GT Pub Date : 2019-03-19
Rediet Abebe; Richard Cole; Vasilis Gkatzelis; Jason D. Hartline

We revisit the well-studied problem of designing mechanisms for one-sided matching markets, where a set of $n$ agents needs to be matched to a set of $n$ heterogeneous items. Each agent $i$ has a value $v_{i,j}$ for each item $j$, and these values are private information that the agents may misreport if doing so leads to a preferred outcome. Ensuring that the agents have no incentive to misreport requires a careful design of the matching mechanism, and mechanisms proposed in the literature mitigate this issue by eliciting only the \emph{ordinal} preferences of the agents, i.e., their ranking of the items from most to least preferred. However, the efficiency guarantees of these mechanisms are based only on weak measures that are oblivious to the underlying values. In this paper we achieve stronger performance guarantees by introducing a mechanism that truthfully elicits the full \emph{cardinal} preferences of the agents, i.e., all of the $v_{i,j}$ values. We evaluate the performance of this mechanism using the much more demanding Nash bargaining solution as a benchmark, and we prove that our mechanism significantly outperforms all ordinal mechanisms (even non-truthful ones). To prove our approximation bounds, we also study the population monotonicity of the Nash bargaining solution in the context of matching markets, providing both upper and lower bounds which are of independent interest.

更新日期：2020-01-22
• arXiv.cs.GT Pub Date : 2019-11-13
Paul W. Goldberg; Alexandros Hollender; Warut Suksompong

We study the fair allocation of a cake, which serves as a metaphor for a divisible resource, under the requirement that each agent should receive a contiguous piece of the cake. While it is known that no finite envy-free algorithm exists in this setting, we exhibit efficient algorithms that produce allocations with low envy among the agents. We then establish NP-hardness results for various decision problems on the existence of envy-free allocations, such as when we fix the ordering of the agents or constrain the positions of certain cuts. In addition, we consider a discretized setting where indivisible items lie on a line and show a number of hardness results extending and strengthening those from prior work. Finally, we investigate connections between approximate and exact envy-freeness, as well as between continuous and discrete cake cutting.

更新日期：2020-01-22
• arXiv.cs.GT Pub Date : 2020-01-16
Deepanshu Vasal; Rajesh K Mishra; Sriram Vishwanath

In this paper, we present a sequential decomposition algorithm to compute graphon mean field equilibrium (GMFE) of dynamic graphon mean field game (GMFG). We consider a large population of players sequentially making strategic decisions where the actions of each player affect their neighbors which is captured in a graph, generated by a known graphon. Each player observes a private state and also a common information as a graphon mean-field population state which represents the empirical networked distribution of other players' types. We consider non-stationary population state dynamics and present a novel backward recursive algorithm to compute GMFE that depend on both, a player's private type, and the current (dynamic) population state determined through the graphon. Each step in this algorithm consists of solving a fixed-point equation. We provide conditions on model parameters for which there exists such a GMFE. Using this algorithm, we obtain the GMFE for a specific security setup in cyber physical systems for different graphons that capture the interactions between the nodes in the system.

更新日期：2020-01-17
• arXiv.cs.GT Pub Date : 2020-01-16
Shivika Narang; Y Narahari

Stable matchings have been studied extensively in both economics and computer science literature. However, most of the work considers only integral matchings. The study of stable fractional matchings is fairly recent and moreover, is scarce. This paper reports the first investigation into the important but unexplored topic of incentive compatibility of matching mechanisms to find stable fractional matchings. We focus our attention on matching instances under strict preferences. First, we make the significant observation that there are matching instances for which no mechanism that produces a stable fractional matching is incentive compatible. We then characterize restricted settings of matching instances admitting unique stable fractional matchings. Specifically, we show that there will exist a unique stable fractional matching for a matching instance if and only if the given matching instance satisfies what we call the conditional mutual first preference property (CMFP). For this class of instances, we prove that every mechanism that produces the unique stable fractional matching is (a) incentive compatible and (b) resistant to coalitional manipulations. We provide a polynomial-time algorithm to compute the stable fractional matching as well. The algorithm uses envy-graphs, hitherto unused in the study of stable matchings.

更新日期：2020-01-17
• arXiv.cs.GT Pub Date : 2020-01-16
Shivika Narang

The blockchain concept forms the backbone of a new wave technology that promises to be deployed extensively in a wide variety of industrial and societal applications. Governments, financial institutions, banks, industrial supply chains, service companies, and even educational institutions and hospitals are investing in a substantial manner in the hope of improving business efficiency and operational robustness through deployment of blockchain technology. This thesis work is concerned with designing trustworthy business-to-business (B2B) market platforms drawing upon blockchain technology and game theory. The proposed platform is built upon three key ideas. First, we use permissioned blockchains with smart contracts as a technically sound approach for building the B2B platform. The blockchain deploys smart contracts that govern the interactions of enterprise buyers and sellers. Second, the smart contracts are designed using a rigorous analysis of a repeated game model of the strategic interactions between buyers and sellers. We show that such smart contracts induce honest behavior from buyers and sellers. Third, we embed cryptographic regulation protocols into the permissioned blockchain to ensure that business sensitive information is not revealed to the competitors. We believe our work is an important step in the direction of building a powerful B2B platform that maximizes social welfare and enables trusted collaboration between strategic enterprise agents.

更新日期：2020-01-17
• arXiv.cs.GT Pub Date : 2020-01-16
Chuang-Chieh Lin; Chi-Jen Lu; Po-An Chen

In this paper, we propose a simple and intuitive model to investigate the efficiency of the two-party election system, especially regarding the nomination process. Each of the two parties has its own candidates, and each of them brings utilities for the people including the supporters and non-supporters. In an election, each party nominates exactly one of its candidates to compete against the other party's. The candidate wins the election with higher odds if he or she brings more utility for all the people. We model such competition as a "two-party election game" such that each party is a player with two or more pure strategies corresponding to its potential candidates, and the payoff of each party is a mixed utility from a selected pair of competing candidates. By looking into the three models, namely, the linear link, Bradley-Terry, and the softmax models, which differ in how to formulate a candidate's winning odds against the competing candidate, we show that the two-party election game may neither have any pure Nash equilibrium nor a bounded price of anarchy. Nevertheless, by considering the conventional "egoism", which states that any candidate benefits his/her party's supporters more than any candidate from the competing party does, we prove that the two-party election game in both the linear link model and the softmax model always has pure Nash equilibria, and furthermore, the price of anarchy is constantly bounded.

更新日期：2020-01-17
• arXiv.cs.GT Pub Date : 2020-01-16
Nikoleta E. Glynatsi; Vincent A. Knight

The Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma has been used for decades as a model of behavioural interactions. From the celebrated performance of Tit for Tat, to the introduction of the zero-determinant strategies, to the use of sophisticated structures such as neural networks, the literature has been exploring the performance of strategies in the game for years. The results of the literature, however, have been relying on the performance of specific strategies in a finite number of tournaments. This manuscript evaluates 195 strategies' effectiveness in more than 40000 tournaments. The top ranked strategies are presented, and moreover, the impact of features on their success are analysed using machine learning techniques. The analysis determines that the cooperation ratio of a strategy in a given tournament compared to the mean and median cooperator is the most important feature. The conclusions are distinct for different types of tournaments. For instance a strategy with a theory of mind would aim to be the mean/median cooperator in standard tournaments, whereas in tournaments with probabilistic ending it would aim to cooperate 10% of the times the median cooperator did.

更新日期：2020-01-17
• arXiv.cs.GT Pub Date : 2020-01-15
Marie Louisa Tølbøll Berthelsen; Kristoffer Arnsfelt Hansen

We study the computational complexity of decision problems about Nash equilibria in $m$-player games. Several such problems have recently been shown to be computationally equivalent to the decision problem for the existential theory of the reals, or stated in terms of complexity classes, $\exists\mathbb{R}$-complete, when $m\geq 3$. We show that, unless they turn into trivial problems, they are $\exists\mathbb{R}$-hard even for 3-player zero-sum games. We also obtain new results about several other decision problems. We show that when $m\geq 3$ the problems of deciding if a game has a Pareto optimal Nash equilibrium or deciding if a game has a strong Nash equilibrium are $\exists\mathbb{R}$-complete. The latter result rectifies a previous claim of NP-completeness in the literature. We show that deciding if a game has an irrational valued Nash equilibrium is $\exists\mathbb{R}$-hard, answering a question of Bil\`o and Mavronicolas, and address also the computational complexity of deciding if a game has a rational valued Nash equilibrium. These results also hold for 3-player zero-sum games. Our proof methodology applies to corresponding decision problems about symmetric Nash equilibria in symmetric games as well, and in particular our new results carry over to the symmetric setting. Finally we show that deciding whether a symmetric $m$-player games has a non-symmetric Nash equilibrium is $\exists\mathbb{R}$-complete when $m\geq 3$, answering a question of Garg, Mehta, Vazirani, and Yazdanbod.

更新日期：2020-01-16
• arXiv.cs.GT Pub Date : 2020-01-14
Dawen Wu

The regret matching algorithm proposed by Sergiu Hart is one of the most powerful iterative methods in finding correlated equilibrium. However, it is possibly not efficient enough, especially in large scale problems. We first rewrite the algorithm in a computationally practical way based on the idea of the regret matrix. Moreover, the rewriting makes the original algorithm more easy to understand. Then by some modification to the original algorithm, we introduce a novel variant, namely faster regret matching. The experiment result shows that the novel algorithm has a speed advantage comparing to the original one.

更新日期：2020-01-16
• arXiv.cs.GT Pub Date : 2020-01-15
Pinkesh Badjatiya; Mausoom Sarkar; Abhishek Sinha; Siddharth Singh; Nikaash Puri; Balaji Krishnamurthy

Social dilemma situations bring out the conflict between individual and group rationality. When individuals act rationally in such situations, the group suffers sub-optimal outcomes. The Iterative Prisoner's Dilemma (IPD) is a two-player game that offers a theoretical framework to model and study such social situations. In the Prisoner's Dilemma, individualistic behavior leads to mutual defection and sub-optimal outcomes. This result is in contrast to what one observes in human groups, where humans often sacrifice individualistic behavior for the good of the collective. It is interesting to study how and why such cooperative and individually irrational behavior emerges in human groups. To this end, recent work models this problem by treating each player as a Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent and evolves cooperative behavioral policies through internal information or reward sharing mechanisms. We propose an approach to evolve cooperative behavior between RL agents playing the IPD game without sharing rewards, internal details (weights, gradients), or a communication channel. We introduce a Status-Quo loss (SQLoss) that incentivizes cooperative behavior by encouraging policy stationarity. We also describe an approach to transform a two-player game (with visual inputs) into its IPD formulation through self-supervised skill discovery (IPDistill).We show how our approach outperforms existing approaches in the Iterative Prisoner's Dilemma and the two-player Coin game.

更新日期：2020-01-16
• arXiv.cs.GT Pub Date : 2019-06-15
Yuanyuan Shi; Baosen Zhang

In this work, we study the interaction of strategic players in continuous action Cournot games with limited information feedback. Cournot game is the essential model for many socio-economic systems where players learn and compete. In addition, in many practical settings these players do not have full knowledge of the system or of each other. In this limited information setting, it becomes important to understand the dynamics and limiting behavior of the players. Specifically, we assume players follow strategies such that in hindsight their payoffs are not exceeded by any single deviating action. Given this no-regret guarantee, we prove that under standard assumptions, the players' joint action (both in the sense of time average and final iteration convergence) converges to the unique Nash equilibrium. In addition, our results naturally extend the existing regret analysis on time average convergence to obtain final iteration convergence rates. Together, our work presents significantly sharper and generalized convergence results, and shows how exploiting the game information feedback can influence the convergence rates.

更新日期：2020-01-16
• arXiv.cs.GT Pub Date : 2020-01-13
Sarah H. Q. Li; Assalé Adjé; Pierre-Loïc Garoche; Behçet Açıkmeşe

Motivated by uncertain parameters encountered in Markov decision processes (MDPs), we study the effect of parameter uncertainty on Bellman operator-based methods. Specifically, we consider a family of MDPs where the cost parameters are from a given compact set. We then define a Bellman operator acting on an input set of value functions to produce a new set of value functions as the output under all possible variations in the cost parameters. Finally we prove the existence of a fixed point of this set-based Bellman operator by showing that it is a contractive operator on a complete metric space.

更新日期：2020-01-15
• arXiv.cs.GT Pub Date : 2020-01-14
Pedro Cisneros-Velarde; Francesco Bullo

We propose a novel network formation game that explains the emergence of various hierarchical structures in groups where self-interested or utility-maximizing individuals decide to establish or severe relationships of authority or collaboration among themselves. We consider two settings: we first consider individuals who do not seek the other party's consent when establishing a relationship and then individuals who do. For both settings, we formally relate the emerged hierarchical structures with the novel inclusion of well-motivated hierarchy promoting terms in the individuals' utility functions. We first analyze the game via a static analysis and characterize all the hierarchical structures that can be formed as its solutions. We then consider the game played dynamically under stochastic interactions among individuals implementing best-response dynamics and analyze the nature of the converged networks.

更新日期：2020-01-15
• arXiv.cs.GT Pub Date : 2020-01-14
David Balduzzi; Wojiech M Czarnecki; Thomas W Anthony; Ian M Gemp; Edward Hughes; Joel Z Leibo; Georgios Piliouras; Thore Graepel

With the success of modern machine learning, it is becoming increasingly important to understand and control how learning algorithms interact. Unfortunately, negative results from game theory show there is little hope of understanding or controlling general n-player games. We therefore introduce smooth markets (SM-games), a class of n-player games with pairwise zero sum interactions. SM-games codify a common design pattern in machine learning that includes (some) GANs, adversarial training, and other recent algorithms. We show that SM-games are amenable to analysis and optimization using first-order methods.

更新日期：2020-01-15
• arXiv.cs.GT Pub Date : 2020-01-11
Donya G. Dobakhshari; Lav R. Varshney; Vijay Gupta

We study a setting in which a principal selects an agent to execute a collection of tasks according to a specified priority sequence. Agents, however, have their own individual priority sequences according to which they wish to execute the tasks. There is information asymmetry since each priority sequence is private knowledge for the individual agent. We design a mechanism for selecting the agent and incentivizing the selected agent to realize a priority sequence for executing the tasks that achieves socially optimal performance. Our proposed mechanism consists of two parts. First, the principal runs an auction to select an agent to allocate tasks to with minimum declared priority sequence misalignment. Then, the principal rewards the agent according to the realized priority sequence with which the tasks were performed. We show that the proposed mechanism is individually rational and incentive compatible. Further, it is also socially optimal for the case of linear cost of priority sequence modification for the agents.

更新日期：2020-01-15
• arXiv.cs.GT Pub Date : 2018-02-19
Donya Ghavidel; Pratyush Chakraborty; Enrique Baeyens; Vijay Gupta; Pramod P. Khargonekar

In this paper, we consider a general distributed system with multiple agents who select and then implement actions in the system. The system has an operator with a centralized objective. The agents, on the other hand, are selfinterested and strategic in the sense that each agent optimizes its own individual objective. The operator aims to mitigate this misalignment by designing an incentive scheme for the agents. The problem is difficult due to the cost functions of the agents being coupled, the objective of the operator not being social welfare, and the operator having no direct control over actions being implemented by the agents. This problem has been studied in many fields, particularly in mechanism design and cost allocation. However, mechanism design typically assumes that the operator has knowledge of the cost functions of the agents and the actions being implemented by the operator. On the other hand, cost allocation classically assumes that agents do not anticipate the effect of their actions on the incentive that they obtain. We remove these assumptions and present an incentive rule for this setup by bridging the gap between mechanism design and classical cost allocation. We analyze whether the proposed design satisfies various desirable properties such as social optimality, budget balance, participation constraint, and so on. We also analyze which of these properties can be satisfied if the assumptions of cost functions of the agents being private and the agents being anticipatory are relaxed.

更新日期：2020-01-15
• arXiv.cs.GT Pub Date : 2019-09-17
Victor Amelkin; Rakesh Vohra

Supply chains are the backbone of the global economy. Disruptions to them can be costly. Centrally managed supply chains invest in ensuring their resilience. Decentralized supply chains, however, must rely upon the self-interest of their individual components to maintain the resilience of the entire chain. We examine the incentives that independent self-interested agents have in forming a resilient supply chain network in the face of production disruptions and competition. In our model, competing suppliers are subject to yield uncertainty (they deliver less than ordered) and congestion (lead time uncertainty or, "soft" supply caps). Competing retailers must decide which suppliers to link to based on both price and reliability. In the presence of yield uncertainty only, the resulting supply chain networks are sparse. Retailers concentrate their links on a single supplier, counter to the idea that they should mitigate yield uncertainty by diversifying their supply base. This happens because retailers benefit from supply variance. It suggests that competition will amplify output uncertainty. When congestion is included as well, the resulting networks are denser and resemble the bipartite expander graphs that have been proposed in the supply chain literature, thereby, providing the first example of endogenous formation of resilient supply chain networks, without resilience being explicitly encoded in payoffs. Finally, we show that a supplier's investments in improved yield can make it worse off. This happens because high production output saturates the market, which, in turn lowers prices and profits for participants.

更新日期：2020-01-15
• arXiv.cs.GT Pub Date : 2020-01-11
Jie Huang; Fanghua Ye; Xu Chen

A game process is a system where the decisions of one agent can influence the decisions of other agents. In the real world, social influences and relationships between agents may influence the decision makings of agents with game behaviors. And in turn, this also gives us the possibility to mine some information from such agents, such as the relationships between them, by the interactions in a game process. In this paper, we propose a Game Generative Network (GGN) framework which utilizes the deviation between the real game outcome and the ideal game model to build networks for game processes, which opens a door for understanding more about agents with game behaviors by graph mining approaches. We apply GGN to the team game as a concrete application and conduct experiments on relationship inference tasks.

更新日期：2020-01-14
• arXiv.cs.GT Pub Date : 2020-01-12
Dongfang Zhao

Despite the popularity and practical applicability of blockchains, there is very limited work on the theoretical foundation of blockchains: The lack of rigorous theory and analysis behind the curtain of blockchains has severely staggered its broader applications. This paper attempts to lay out a theoretical foundation for a specific type of blockchains---the ones requiring basic authenticity from the participants, also called \textit{permissioned blockchain}. We formulate permissioned blockchain systems and operations into a game-theoretical problem by incorporating constraints implied by the wisdom from distributed computing and Byzantine systems. We show that in a noncooperative blockchain game (NBG), a Nash equilibrium can be efficiently found in a closed-form even though the game involves more than two players. Somewhat surprisingly, the simulation results of the Nash equilibrium implies that the game can reach a stable status regardless of the number of Byzantine nodes and trustworthy players. We then study a harder problem where players are allowed to form coalitions: the coalitional blockchain game (CBG). We show that although the Shapley value for a CBG can be expressed in a more succinct form, its core is empty.

更新日期：2020-01-14
• arXiv.cs.GT Pub Date : 2020-01-12
Matthew Elliott; Benjamin Golub; Matthew V. Leduc

We model the production of complex goods in a large supply network. Firms source several essential inputs through relationships with other firms. Relationships may fail, and given this idosyncratic risk, firms multisource inputs and make costly investments to make relationships with suppliers stronger (less likely to fail). We find that aggregate production is discontinuous in the strength of these relationships. This has stark implications for equilibrium outcomes. We give conditions under which the supply network is endogenously fragile, so that arbitrarily small negative shocks to relationship strength lead to a large, discontinuous drop in aggregate output.

更新日期：2020-01-14
• arXiv.cs.GT Pub Date : 2020-01-12
Patricia Bouyer; Stéphane Le Roux; Youssouf Oualhadj; Mickael Randour; Pierre Vandenhove

For decades, two-player (antagonistic) games on graphs have been a framework of choice for many important problems in theoretical computer science. A notorious one is controller synthesis, which can be rephrased through the game-theoretic metaphor as the quest for a winning strategy of the system in a game against its antagonistic environment. Depending on the specification, optimal strategies might be simple or quite complex, for example having to use (possibly infinite) memory. Hence, research strives to understand which settings allow for simple strategies. In 2005, Gimbert and Zielonka provided a complete characterization of preference relations (a formal framework to model specifications and game objectives) that admit memoryless optimal strategies for both players. In the last fifteen years however, practical applications have driven the community toward games with complex or multiple objectives, where memory --- finite or infinite --- is almost always required. Despite much effort, the exact frontiers of the class of preference relations that admit finite-memory optimal strategies still elude us. In this work, we establish a complete characterization of preference relations that admit optimal strategies using arena-independent finite memory, generalizing the work of Gimbert and Zielonka to the finite-memory case. We also prove an equivalent to their celebrated corollary of utmost practical interest: if both players have optimal (arena-independent-)finite-memory strategies in all one-player games, then it is also the case in all two-player games. Finally, we pinpoint the boundaries of our results with regard to the literature: our work completely covers the case of arena-independent memory (e.g., multiple parity objectives, lower- and upper-bounded energy objectives), and paves the way to the arena-dependent case (e.g., multiple lower-bounded energy objectives).

更新日期：2020-01-14
• arXiv.cs.GT Pub Date : 2020-01-12
Vladimir Gurvich; Michael Vyalyi

We study algorithmic complexity of solving subtraction games in a~fixed dimension with a finite difference set. We prove that there exists a game in this class such that any algorithm solving the game runs in exponential time. Also we prove an existence of a game in this class such that solving the game is PSPACE-hard. The results are based on the construction introduced by Larsson and W\"astlund. It relates subtraction games and cellular automata.

更新日期：2020-01-14
• arXiv.cs.GT Pub Date : 2020-01-13
Benoît KloecknerLAMA

This article is about synchronized iterative voting in the context of Approval Voting. Assuming that, before an election, successive polls occur to which voters react strategically, we shall exhibit examples showing the possibility of cycles with strong negative properties (in particular, non election of an existing Condorcet winner, or possible election of a candidate strongly rejected by a majority of the electorate). We also show that such cycles persist if only a proportion of the voters adjust their ballot at each iteration and if their strategy changes when close ties occur.

更新日期：2020-01-14
• arXiv.cs.GT Pub Date : 2020-01-13
Faheem Zafari; Prithwish Basu; Kin K. Leung; Jian Li; Ananthram Swami; Don Towsley

The growing demand for edge computing resources, particularly due to increasing popularity of Internet of Things (IoT), and distributed machine/deep learning applications poses a significant challenge. On the one hand, certain edge service providers (ESPs) may not have sufficient resources to satisfy their applications according to the associated service-level agreements. On the other hand, some ESPs may have additional unused resources. In this paper, we propose a resource-sharing framework that allows different ESPs to optimally utilize their resources and improve the satisfaction level of applications subject to constraints such as communication cost for sharing resources across ESPs. Our framework considers that different ESPs have their own objectives for utilizing their resources, thus resulting in a multi-objective optimization problem. We present an $N$-person \emph{Nash Bargaining Solution} (NBS) for resource allocation and sharing among ESPs with \emph{Pareto} optimality guarantee. Furthermore, we propose a \emph{distributed}, primal-dual algorithm to obtain the NBS by proving that the strong-duality property holds for the resultant resource sharing optimization problem. Using synthetic and real-world data traces, we show numerically that the proposed NBS based framework not only enhances the ability to satisfy applications' resource demands, but also improves utilities of different ESPs.

更新日期：2020-01-14
• arXiv.cs.GT Pub Date : 2020-01-13
Marcin Jurdziński; Rémi Morvan

An attractor decomposition meta-algorithm for solving parity games is given that generalizes the classic McNaughton-Zielonka algorithm and its recent quasi-polynomial variants due to Parys (2019), and to Lehtinen, Schewe, and Wojtczak (2019). The central concepts studied and exploited are attractor decompositions of dominia in parity games and the ordered trees that describe the inductive structure of attractor decompositions. The main technical results include the embeddable decomposition theorem and the dominion separation theorem that together help establish a precise structural condition for the correctness of the universal algorithm: it suffices that the two ordered trees given to the algorithm as inputs embed the trees of some attractor decompositions of the largest dominia for each of the two players, respectively. The universal algorithm yields McNaughton-Zielonka, Parys's, and Lehtinen-Schewe-Wojtczak algorithms as special cases when suitable universal trees are given to it as inputs. The main technical results provide a unified proof of correctness and deep structural insights into those algorithms. A symbolic implementation of the universal algorithm is also given that improves the symbolic space complexity of solving parity games in quasi-polynomial time from $O(d \lg n)$---achieved by Chatterjee, Dvo\v{r}\'{a}k, Henzinger, and Svozil (2018)---down to $O(\lg d)$, where $n$ is the number of vertices and $d$ is the number of distinct priorities in a parity game. This not only exponentially improves the dependence on $d$, but it also entirely removes the dependence on $n$.

更新日期：2020-01-14
• arXiv.cs.GT Pub Date : 2020-01-13
Karoliina Lehtinen; Martin Zimmermann

We introduce good-for-games $\omega$-pushdown automata ($\omega$-GFG-PDA). These are automata whose nondeterminism can be resolved based on the run constructed thus far. Good-for-gameness enables automata to be composed with games, trees, and other automata, applications which otherwise require deterministic automata. Our main results show that $\omega$-GFG-PDA are more expressive than deterministic $\omega$-pushdown automata and that solving infinite games with winning conditions specified by $\omega$-GFG-PDA is EXPTIME-complete, i.e., we have identified a new class of $\omega$-contextfree winning conditions for which solving games is decidable. This means in particular that the universality problem is in EXPTIME as well. Moreover, we study closure properties of the class of languages recognized by $\omega$-GFG-PDA and decidability of good-for-gameness of $\omega$-pushdown automata and languages.

更新日期：2020-01-14
• arXiv.cs.GT Pub Date : 2020-01-13
John Fearnley; Rasmus Ibsen-Jensen; Rahul Savani

The main result of this paper is that computing the value of a one-clock priced timed game (OCPTG) is PSPACE-hard. Along the way, we provide a family of OCPTGs that have an exponential number of event points. Both results hold even in very restricted classes of games such as DAGs with treewidth three. Finally, we provide a number of positive results, including polynomial-time algorithms for even more restricted classes of OCPTGs such as trees.

更新日期：2020-01-14
• arXiv.cs.GT Pub Date : 2017-10-16
Andrea Galeotti; Benjamin Golub; Sanjeev Goyal

We study games in which a network mediates strategic spillovers and externalities among the players. How does a planner optimally target interventions that change individuals' private returns to investment? We analyze this question by decomposing any intervention into orthogonal principal components, which are determined by the network and are ordered according to their associated eigenvalues. There is a close connection between the nature of spillovers and the representation of various principal components in the optimal intervention. In games of strategic complements (substitutes), interventions place more weight on the top (bottom) principal components, which reflect more global (local) network structure. For large budgets, optimal interventions are simple -- they involve a single principal component.

更新日期：2020-01-14
• arXiv.cs.GT Pub Date : 2018-10-26
Ilai Bistritz; Amir Leshem

We consider an N-player multi-armed bandit game where each player chooses one out of M arms for T turns. Each player has different expected rewards for the arms, and the instantaneous rewards are independent and identically distributed or Markovian. When two or more players choose the same arm, they all receive zero reward. Performance is measured using the expected sum of regrets, compared to optimal assignment of arms to players that maximizes the sum of expected rewards. We assume that each player only knows her actions and the reward she received each turn. Players cannot observe the actions of other players, and no communication between players is possible. We present a distributed algorithm and prove that it achieves an expected sum of regrets of near-O\left(\log T\right). This is the first algorithm to achieve a near order optimal regret in this fully distributed scenario. All other works have assumed that either all players have the same vector of expected rewards or that communication between players is possible.

更新日期：2020-01-14
• arXiv.cs.GT Pub Date : 2018-10-27
Christian A. Schroeder de Witt; Jakob N. Foerster; Gregory Farquhar; Philip H. S. Torr; Wendelin Boehmer; Shimon Whiteson

Cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning often requires decentralised policies, which severely limit the agents' ability to coordinate their behaviour. In this paper, we show that common knowledge between agents allows for complex decentralised coordination. Common knowledge arises naturally in a large number of decentralised cooperative multi-agent tasks, for example, when agents can reconstruct parts of each others' observations. Since agents an independently agree on their common knowledge, they can execute complex coordinated policies that condition on this knowledge in a fully decentralised fashion. We propose multi-agent common knowledge reinforcement learning (MACKRL), a novel stochastic actor-critic algorithm that learns a hierarchical policy tree. Higher levels in the hierarchy coordinate groups of agents by conditioning on their common knowledge, or delegate to lower levels with smaller subgroups but potentially richer common knowledge. The entire policy tree can be executed in a fully decentralised fashion. As the lowest policy tree level consists of independent policies for each agent, MACKRL reduces to independently learnt decentralised policies as a special case. We demonstrate that our method can exploit common knowledge for superior performance on complex decentralised coordination tasks, including a stochastic matrix game and challenging problems in StarCraft II unit micromanagement.

更新日期：2020-01-14
• arXiv.cs.GT Pub Date : 2020-01-09
Baichuan Mo; Zhejing Cao; Hongmou Zhang; Yu Shen; Jinhua Zhao

The emergence of autonomous vehicles (AVs) is anticipated to influence the public transportation (PT) system. Many possible relationships between AV and PT are proposed depending on the policy and institution, where competition and cooperation are two main categories. This paper focuses on the former in a hypothetical scenario-"if both AV and PT operators were only profit-oriented." We aim to quantitatively evaluate the system performance (e.g. level of service, operators' financial viability, transport efficiency) when AV and PT are profit-oriented competitors with dynamic adjustable supply strategies under certain policy constraints. We assume AV can adjust the fleetsize and PT can adjust the headway. Service fare and bus routes are fixed. The competition process is analyzed through an agent-based simulation platform, which incorporates a proposed heuristic dynamic supply updating algorithm (HDSUA). The first-mile scenario in Singapore Tampines area is selected as the case study, where only bus is considered for PT system. We found that when AV and bus operators are given the flexibility to adjust supply, both of them will re-distribute their supply spatially and temporally, leading to higher profits. In temporal dimension, both AV and bus will concentrate their supplies in morning and evening peak hours, and reduce the supplies in off-peak hours. The competition between AV and PT decreases passengers' travel time but increase their travel cost. The generalized travel cost is still reduced when counting the value of time. The bus supply adjustment can increase the bus average load and reduce total passenger car equivalent (PCE), which is good for transport efficiency and sustainability. But the AV supply adjustment shows the opposite effect. Overall, the competition does not necessarily bring out loss-gain results. A win-win outcome is also possible under certain policy interventions.

更新日期：2020-01-13
• arXiv.cs.GT Pub Date : 2020-01-09
Mustafa Abdallah; Parinaz Naghizadeh; Ashish R. Hota; Timothy Cason; Saurabh Bagchi; Shreyas Sundaram

We consider a system consisting of multiple interdependent assets, and a set of defenders, each responsible for securing a subset of the assets against an attacker. The interdependencies between the assets are captured by an attack graph, where an edge from one asset to another indicates that if the former asset is compromised, an attack can be launched on the latter asset. Each edge has an associated probability of successful attack, which can be reduced via security investments by the defenders. In such scenarios, we investigate the security investments that arise under certain features of human decision-making that have been identified in behavioral economics. In particular, humans have been shown to perceive probabilities in a nonlinear manner, typically overweighting low probabilities and underweighting high probabilities. We show that suboptimal investments can arise under such weighting in certain network topologies. We also show that pure strategy Nash equilibria exist in settings with multiple (behavioral) defenders, and study the inefficiency of the equilibrium investments by behavioral defenders compared to a centralized socially optimal solution.

更新日期：2020-01-13
• arXiv.cs.GT Pub Date : 2020-01-09
Emily Meigs; Francesca Parise; Asuman Ozdaglar; Daron Acemoglu

We consider a two-road dynamic routing game where the state of one of the roads (the "risky road") is stochastic and may change over time. This generates room for experimentation. A central planner may wish to induce some of the (finite number of atomic) agents to use the risky road even when the expected cost of travel there is high in order to obtain accurate information about the state of the road. Since agents are strategic, we show that in order to generate incentives for experimentation the central planner however needs to limit the number of agents using the risky road when the expected cost of travel on the risky road is low. In particular, because of congestion, too much use of the risky road when the state is favorable would make experimentation no longer incentive compatible. We characterize the optimal incentive compatible recommendation system, first in a two-stage game and then in an infinite-horizon setting. In both cases, this system induces only partial, rather than full, information sharing among the agents (otherwise there would be too much exploitation of the risky road when costs there are low).

更新日期：2020-01-13
• arXiv.cs.GT Pub Date : 2020-01-09
MyungJae Shin; Joongheon Kim; Marco Levorato

State-of-the-art drone technologies have severe flight time limitations due to weight constraints, which inevitably lead to a relatively small amount of available energy. Therefore, frequent battery replacement or recharging is necessary in applications such as delivery, exploration, or support to the wireless infrastructure. Mobile charging stations (i.e., mobile stations with charging equipment) for outdoor ad-hoc battery charging is one of the feasible solutions to address this issue. However, the ability of these platforms to charge the drones is limited in terms of the number and charging time. This paper designs an auction-based mechanism to control the charging schedule in multi-drone setting. In this paper, charging time slots are auctioned, and their assignment is determined by a bidding process. The main challenge in developing this framework is the lack of prior knowledge on the distribution of the number of drones participating in the auction. Based on optimal second-price-auction, the proposed formulation, then, relies on deep learning algorithms to learn such distribution online. Numerical results from extensive simulations show that the proposed deep learning-based approach provides effective battery charging control in multi-drone scenarios.

更新日期：2020-01-13
• arXiv.cs.GT Pub Date : 2020-01-09
Roberto Cominetti; Marco Scarsini; Marc Schröder; Nicolás Stier-Moses

We study the convergence of sequences of atomic unsplittable congestion games with an increasing number of players. We consider two situations. In the first setting, each player has a weight that tends to zero, in which case the mixed equilibria of the finite games converge to the set of Wardrop equilibria of the corresponding nonatomic limit game. In the second case, players have unit weights, but participate in the game with a probability that tends to zero. In this case, the mixed equilibria converge to the set of Wardrop equilibria of another nonatomic game with suitably defined costs, which can be seen as a Poisson game in the sense of Myerson (1998). In both settings we show that the price of anarchy of the sequence of games converges to the price of anarchy of the nonatomic limit. Beyond the case of congestion games, we establish a general result on the convergence of large games with random players towards a Poisson game.

更新日期：2020-01-10
• arXiv.cs.GT Pub Date : 2020-01-09
Ioannis C. Konstantakopoulos; Kristy A. Hamilton; Tanya Veeravalli; Costas Spanos; Roy Dong

As Internet of Things (IoT) technologies are increasingly being deployed, situations frequently arise where multiple stakeholders must reconcile preferences to control a shared resource. We perform a 5-month long experiment dubbed "smartSDH" (carried out in 27 employees' office space) where users report their preferences for the brightness of overhead lighting. smartSDH implements a modified Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanism; assuming users are rational, it incentivizes truthful reporting, implements the socially desirable outcome, and compensates participants to ensure higher payoffs under smartSDH when compared with the default outside option. smartSDH assesses the feasibility of the VCG mechanism in the context of smart building control and evaluated smartSDH's effect using metrics such as light level satisfaction, incentive satisfaction, and energy consumption. Despite the mechanism's theoretical properties, we found participants were significantly less satisfied with light brightness and incentives determined by the VCG mechanism over time. These data suggest the need for more realistic behavioral models to design IoT technologies and highlights difficulties in estimating preferences from observable external factors such as atmospheric conditions.

更新日期：2020-01-10
• arXiv.cs.GT Pub Date : 2020-01-09
Francis Bloch; Bhaskar Dutta; Marcin Dziubinski

We propose and study a strategic model of hiding in a network, where the network designer chooses the links and his position in the network facing the seeker who inspects and disrupts the network. We characterize optimal networks for the hider, as well as equilibrium hiding and seeking strategies on these networks. We show that optimal networks are either equivalent to cycles or variants of a core-periphery networks where every node in the periphery is connected to a single node in the core.

更新日期：2020-01-10
• arXiv.cs.GT Pub Date : 2020-01-08
Shengling Wang; Peizi Ma; Qin Hu; Xiuzhen Cheng; Weifeng Lv

Social dilemmas exist in various fields and give rise to the so-called free-riding problem, leading to collective fiascos. The difficulty of tracking individual behaviors makes egoistic incentives in large-scale systems a challenging task. However, the state-of-the-art mechanisms are either individual-based or state-dependent, resulting in low efficiency in large-scale networks. In this paper, we propose an egoistic incentive mechanism from a connected (network) perspective rather than an isolated (individual) perspective by taking advantage of the social nature of people. We make use of a zero-determinant (ZD) strategy for rewarding cooperation and sanctioning defection. After proving cooperation is the dominant strategy for ZD players, we optimize their deployment to facilitate cooperation over the whole system. To further speed up cooperation, we derive a ZD alliance strategy for sequential multiple-player repeated games to empower ZD players with higher controllable leverage, which undoubtedly enriches the theoretical system of ZD strategies and broadens their application domain. Our approach is stateless and stable, which contributes to its scalability. Extensive simulations based on a real world trace data as well as synthetic data demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed egoistic incentive approach under different networking scenarios.

更新日期：2020-01-09
• arXiv.cs.GT Pub Date : 2019-08-12
Mathieu Besançon; Miguel F. Anjos; Luce Brotcorne

Bilevel optimization studies problems where the optimal response to a second mathematical optimization problem is integrated in the constraints. Such structure arises in a variety of decision-making problems in areas such as market equilibria, policy design or product pricing. We introduce near-optimal robustness for bilevel problems, protecting the upper-level decision-maker from bounded rationality at the lower level and show it is a restriction of the corresponding pessimistic bilevel problem. Essential properties are derived in generic and specific settings. This model finds a corresponding and intuitive interpretation in various situations cast as bilevel optimization problems. We develop a duality-based solution method for cases where the lower level is convex, leveraging the methodology from robust and bilevel literature. The models obtained are tested numerically using different solvers and formulations, showing the successful implementation of the near-optimal bilevel problem.

更新日期：2020-01-08
• arXiv.cs.GT Pub Date : 2019-12-06
Michael Neuder; Daniel J. Moroz; Rithvik Rao; David C. Parkes

Proof-of-Stake consensus protocols give rise to complex modeling challenges. We analyze the recently-updated Tezos Proof-of-Stake protocol and demonstrate that, under certain conditions, rational participants are incentivized to behave dishonestly. In doing so, we provide a theoretical analysis of the feasibility and profitability of a block stealing attack that we call selfish endorsing, a concrete instance of an attack previously only theoretically considered. We propose and analyze a simple change to the Tezos protocol which significantly reduces the (already small) profitability of this dishonest behavior, and introduce a new delay and reward scheme that is provably secure against length-1 and length-2 selfish endorsing attacks. Our framework provides a template for analyzing other Proof-of-Stake implementations for selfish behavior.

更新日期：2020-01-08
• arXiv.cs.GT Pub Date : 2020-01-06
Xu Wang; Randall Berry

LTE-U is an extension of the Long Term Evolution (LTE) standard for operation in unlicensed spectrum. LTE-U differs from WiFi, the predominant technology used in unlicensed spectrum in that it utilizes a duty cycle mode for accessing the spectrum and allows for a more seamless integration with LTE deployments in licensed spectrum. There have been a number of technical studies on the co-existence of LTE-U and WiFi in unlicensed spectrum In this paper, we instead investigate the impact of such a technology from an economic perspective. We consider a model in which an incumbent service provider (SP) deploys a duty cycle-based technology like LTE-U in an unlicensed band along with operating in a licensed band and competes with one or more entrants that only operate in the unlicensed band using a different technology like WiFi. We characterize the impact of a technology like LTE-U on the market outcome and show that the welfare impacts of this technology are subtle, depending in part on the amount of unlicensed spectrum and number of entrants. The difference in spectral efficiency between LTE and WiFi also plays a role in the competition among SPs. Finally, we investigate the impact of the duty cycle and the portion of unlicensed spectrum used by the technology.

更新日期：2020-01-07
• arXiv.cs.GT Pub Date : 2014-04-14
S. Rasoul Etesami

Motivated by emerging resource allocation and data placement problems such as web caches and peer-to-peer systems, we consider and study a class of resource allocation problems over a network of agents (nodes). In this model, nodes can store only a limited number of resources while accessing the remaining ones through their closest neighbors. We consider this problem under both optimization and game-theoretic frameworks. In the case of optimal resource allocation we will first show that when there are only k=2 resources, the optimal allocation can be found efficiently in O(n^2\log n) steps, where n denotes the total number of nodes. However, for k>2 this problem becomes NP-hard with no polynomial time approximation algorithm with a performance guarantee better than 1+1/102k^2, even under metric access costs. We then provide a 3-approximation algorithm for the optimal resource allocation which runs only in linear time O(n). Subsequently, we look at this problem under a selfish setting formulated as a noncooperative game and provide a 3-approximation algorithm for obtaining its pure Nash equilibria under metric access costs. We then establish an equivalence between the set of pure Nash equilibria and flip-optimal solutions of the Max-k-Cut problem over a specific weighted complete graph. Using this reduction, we show that finding the lexicographically smallest Nash equilibrium for k> 2 is NP-hard, and provide an algorithm to find it in O(n^3 2^n) steps. While the reduction to weighted Max-k-Cut suggests that finding a pure Nash equilibrium using best response dynamics might be PLS-hard, it allows us to use tools from quadratic programming to devise more systematic algorithms towards obtaining Nash equilibrium points.

更新日期：2020-01-07
• arXiv.cs.GT Pub Date : 2018-06-04
László Csató

Penalty shootout in soccer is recognized to be unfair because the team kicking first in all rounds enjoys a significant advantage. The so-called Catch-Up Rule has been suggested recently to solve this problem but is shown here not to be fairer than the simpler deterministic Alternating (ABBA) Rule that has already been tried. We introduce the Adjusted Catch-Up Rule by guaranteeing the first penalty of the possible sudden death stage to the team disadvantaged in the first round. It outperforms the Catch-Up and Alternating Rules, while remains straightforward to implement. A general measure of complexity for penalty shootout mechanisms is also provided as the minimal number of binary questions required to decide the first-mover in a given round without knowing the history of the penalty shootout. This quantification permits a two-dimensional evaluation of any mechanism proposed in the future.

更新日期：2020-01-07
• arXiv.cs.GT Pub Date : 2019-05-06
Aris Filos-Ratsikas; Evi Micha; Alexandros A. Voudouris

Voting can abstractly model any decision-making scenario and as such it has been extensively studied over the decades. Recently, the related literature has focused on quantifying the impact of utilizing only limited information in the voting process on the societal welfare for the outcome, by bounding the distortion of voting rules. Even though there has been significant progress towards this goal, all previous works have so far neglected the fact that in many scenarios (like presidential elections) voting is actually a distributed procedure. In this paper, we consider a setting in which the voters are partitioned into disjoint districts and vote locally therein to elect local winning alternatives using a voting rule; the final outcome is then chosen from the set of these alternatives. We prove tight bounds on the distortion of well-known voting rules for such distributed elections both from a worst-case perspective as well as from a best-case one. Our results indicate that the partition of voters into districts leads to considerably higher distortion, a phenomenon which we also experimentally showcase using real-world data.

更新日期：2020-01-07
• arXiv.cs.GT Pub Date : 2019-07-18
Georgios Amanatidis; Georgios Birmpas; Aris Filos-Ratsikas; Alexandros A. Voudouris

Aggregating the preferences of individuals into a collective decision is the core subject of study of social choice theory. In 2006, Procaccia and Rosenschein considered a utilitarian social choice setting, where the agents have explicit numerical values for the alternatives, yet they only report their linear orderings over them. To compare different aggregation mechanisms, Procaccia and Rosenschein introduced the notion of distortion, which quantifies the inefficiency of using only ordinal information when trying to maximize the social welfare, i.e., the sum of the underlying values of the agents for the chosen outcome. Since then, this research area has flourished and bounds on the distortion have been obtained for a wide variety of fundamental scenarios. However, the vast majority of the existing literature is focused on the case where nothing is known beyond the ordinal preferences of the agents over the alternatives. In this paper, we take a more expressive approach, and consider mechanisms that are allowed to further ask a few cardinal queries in order to gain partial access to the underlying values that the agents have for the alternatives. With this extra power, we design new deterministic mechanisms that achieve significantly improved distortion bounds and, in many cases, outperform the best-known randomized ordinal mechanisms. We paint an almost complete picture of the number of queries required to achieve specific distortion bounds.

更新日期：2020-01-07
• arXiv.cs.GT Pub Date : 2019-11-03
Xiangyuan Zhang; Kaiqing Zhang; Erik Miehling; Tamer Başar

Making decisions in the presence of a strategic opponent requires one to take into account the opponent's ability to actively mask its intended objective. To describe such strategic situations, we introduce the non-cooperative inverse reinforcement learning (N-CIRL) formalism. The N-CIRL formalism consists of two agents with completely misaligned objectives, where only one of the agents knows the true objective function. Formally, we model the N-CIRL formalism as a zero-sum Markov game with one-sided incomplete information. Through interacting with the more informed player, the less informed player attempts to both infer, and act according to, the true objective function. As a result of the one-sided incomplete information, the multi-stage game can be decomposed into a sequence of single-stage games expressed by a recursive formula. Solving this recursive formula yields the value of the N-CIRL game and the more informed player's equilibrium strategy. Another recursive formula, constructed by forming an auxiliary game, termed the dual game, yields the less informed player's strategy. Building upon these two recursive formulas, we develop a computationally tractable algorithm to approximately solve for the equilibrium strategies. Finally, we demonstrate the benefits of our N-CIRL formalism over the existing multi-agent IRL formalism via extensive numerical simulation in a novel cyber security setting.

更新日期：2020-01-07
• arXiv.cs.GT Pub Date : 2019-12-06
Paul Riggins; David McPherson

We propose the study of mathematical ludology, which aims to formally interrogate questions of interest to game studies and game design in particular. The goal is to extend our mathematical understanding of complex games beyond decision-making---the typical focus of game theory and artificial intelligence efforts---to explore other aspects such as game mechanics, structure, relationships between games, and connections between game rules and user-interfaces, as well as exploring related gameplay phenomena and typical player behavior. In this paper, we build a basic foundation for this line of study by developing a hierarchy of game descriptions, mathematical formalism to compactly describe complex discrete games, and equivalence relations on the space of game systems.

更新日期：2020-01-07
• arXiv.cs.GT Pub Date : 2020-01-03
Quanyan Zhu

In this chapter, we introduce methods to address resiliency issues for control systems. The main challenge for control systems is its cyber-physical system nature which strongly couples the cyber systems with physical layer dynamics. Hence the resiliency issues for control systems need to be addressed by integrating the cyber resiliency with the physical layer resiliency. We introduce frameworks that can provide a holistic view of the control system resiliency and a quantitative design paradigm that can enable an optimal cross-layer and cross-stage design at the planning, operation, and recovery stage of control systems. The control systems are often large-scale systems in industrial application and critical infrastructures. Decentralized control of such systems is indispensable. We extend the resiliency framework to address distributed and collaborative resiliency among decentralized control agents.

更新日期：2020-01-06
• arXiv.cs.GT Pub Date : 2020-01-03
Faizan Ali; Moayad Aloqaily; Omar Alfandi; Oznur Ozkasap

Energy trading is evolved by the availability ofdistributed energy resources and by energy users who producemore energy than they need and can sell their excess powerfor profit. Energy trading system takes advantage of varioussources and effectively coordinates the energy to ensure efficientand optimal utilization of the available resources and providesbetter services for energy users. It achieves that goal by managingphysical, social and business infrastructures using technologiessuch as Internet of Things (IoT), cloud computing and networksystems, which facilitates both citizens and the policy makers.Peer-to-peer (P2P) energy trading is a prevailing research topicthat involves several management and technical barriers. Thispaper provides an overview of the P2P energy trading and theutilization of blockchain to enhance the efficiency and the overallperformance including the degree of decentralization, scalabilityand the security of the systems. Moreover, three blockchainbased energy trading models have been proposed to overcomethe technical challenges and market barriers for better adoptionof this disruptive technology. The paper also discusses the openissues and future directions pertaining to P2P blockchain basedenergy trading.

更新日期：2020-01-06
• arXiv.cs.GT Pub Date : 2019-05-15
Anthony P. Young; David Kohan Marzagao; Josh Murphy

We apply ideas from abstract argumentation theory to study cooperative game theory. Building on Dung's results in his seminal paper, we further the correspondence between Dung's four argumentation semantics and solution concepts in cooperative game theory by showing that complete extensions (the grounded extension) correspond to Roth's subsolutions (respectively, the supercore). We then investigate the relationship between well-founded argumentation frameworks and convex games, where in each case the semantics (respectively, solution concepts) coincide; we prove that three-player convex games do not in general have well-founded argumentation frameworks.

更新日期：2020-01-06
• arXiv.cs.GT Pub Date : 2019-12-31
Aggelos Kiayias; Aikaterini-Panagiota Stouka

Consider a set of parties invited to execute a protocol $\Pi$. The protocol will incur some cost to run while in the end (or at regular intervals), it will populate and update local tables that assign (virtual) rewards to participants. Each participant aspires to offset the costs of participation by these virtual payoffs that are provided in the course of the protocol. In this setting, we introduce and study a notion of coalition-safe equilibrium. In particular, we consider a strategic coalition of participants that is centrally coordinated and potentially deviates from $\Pi$ with the objective to increase its utility with respect to the view of {\em at least one} of the other participants. The protocol $\Pi$ is called a coalition-safe equilibrium with virtual payoffs (EVP) if no such protocol deviation exists. We apply our notion to study incentives in blockchain protocols. We proceed to use our framework to provide a unified picture of incentives in the Bitcoin blockchain, for absolute and relative rewards based utility functions, as well as prove novel results regarding incentives of the Fruitchain blockchain protocol [PODC 2017] showing that the equilibrium condition holds for collusions up to $n-1$ players for absolute rewards based utility functions and less than $n/2$ for relative rewards based utility functions, with the latter result holding for any "weakly fair" blockchain protocol, a new property that we introduce and may be of independent interest.

更新日期：2020-01-04
• arXiv.cs.GT Pub Date : 2019-12-31
Mateusz K. Tarkowski; Szymon Matejczyk; Tomasz P. Michalak; Michael Wooldridge

Myerson first introduced graph-restricted games in order to model the interaction of cooperative players with an underlying communication network. A dedicated solution concept -- the Myerson value -- is perhaps the most important normative solution concept for cooperative games on graphs. Unfortunately, its computation is computationally challenging. In particular, although exact algorithms have been proposed, they must traverse all connected coalitions of the graph of which there may be exponentially many. In this paper, we consider the issue of approximating the Myerson value for arbitrary graphs and characteristic functions. While Monte Carlo approximations have been proposed for the related concept of the Shapley value, their suitability for the Myerson value has not been studied. Given this, we evaluate and compare (both theoretically and empiraclly) three Monte Carlo sampling methods for the Myerson value: conventional method of sampling permutations; a new, hybrid algorithm that combines exact computations and sampling; and sampling of connected coalitions. We find that our hybrid algorithm performs very well and also significantly improves on the conventional methods.

更新日期：2020-01-04
• arXiv.cs.GT Pub Date : 2019-12-14
Ajay Kumar Shrestha; Julita Vassileva

Blockchain technology has evolved as a promising means to transform data management models in many domains including healthcare, agricultural research, tourism domains etc. In the research community, a usable blockchain-based system can allow users to create a proof of ownership and provenance of the research work, share research data without losing control and ownership of it, provide incentives for sharing and give users full transparency and control over who access their data, when and for what purpose. The initial adoption of such blockchain-based systems is necessary for continued use of the services, but their user acceptance behavioral model has not been well investigated in the literature. In this paper, we take the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) as a foundation and extend the external constructs to uncover how the perceived ease of use, perceived usability, quality of the system and perceived enjoyment influence the intention to use the blockchain-based system. We based our study on user evaluation of a prototype of a blockchain-based research data sharing framework using a TAM validated questionnaire. Our results show that, overall, all the individual constructs of the behavior model significantly influence the intention to use the system while their collective effect is found to be insignificant. The quality of the system and the perceived enjoyment have stronger influence on the perceived usefulness. However, the effect of perceived ease of use on the perceived usefulness is not supported. Finally, we discuss the implications of our findings.

更新日期：2020-01-04
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