17,755 research outputs found
??-Completeness of Stationary Nash Equilibria in Perfect Information Stochastic Games
We show that the problem of deciding whether in a multi-player perfect information recursive game (i.e. a stochastic game with terminal rewards) there exists a stationary Nash equilibrium ensuring each player a certain payoff is ??-complete. Our result holds for acyclic games, where a Nash equilibrium may be computed efficiently by backward induction, and even for deterministic acyclic games with non-negative terminal rewards. We further extend our results to the existence of Nash equilibria where a single player is surely winning. Combining our result with known gadget games without any stationary Nash equilibrium, we obtain that for cyclic games, just deciding existence of any stationary Nash equilibrium is ??-complete. This holds for reach-a-set games, stay-in-a-set games, and for deterministic recursive games
Characterizing the Power of Moving Target Defense via Cyber Epidemic Dynamics
Moving Target Defense (MTD) can enhance the resilience of cyber systems
against attacks. Although there have been many MTD techniques, there is no
systematic understanding and {\em quantitative} characterization of the power
of MTD. In this paper, we propose to use a cyber epidemic dynamics approach to
characterize the power of MTD. We define and investigate two complementary
measures that are applicable when the defender aims to deploy MTD to achieve a
certain security goal. One measure emphasizes the maximum portion of time
during which the system can afford to stay in an undesired configuration (or
posture), without considering the cost of deploying MTD. The other measure
emphasizes the minimum cost of deploying MTD, while accommodating that the
system has to stay in an undesired configuration (or posture) for a given
portion of time. Our analytic studies lead to algorithms for optimally
deploying MTD.Comment: 12 pages; 4 figures; Hotsos 14, 201
Cooperation Enforcement and Collusion Resistance in Repeated Public Goods Games
Enforcing cooperation among substantial agents is one of the main objectives
for multi-agent systems. However, due to the existence of inherent social
dilemmas in many scenarios, the free-rider problem may arise during agents'
long-run interactions and things become even severer when self-interested
agents work in collusion with each other to get extra benefits. It is commonly
accepted that in such social dilemmas, there exists no simple strategy for an
agent whereby she can simultaneously manipulate on the utility of each of her
opponents and further promote mutual cooperation among all agents. Here, we
show that such strategies do exist. Under the conventional repeated public
goods game, we novelly identify them and find that, when confronted with such
strategies, a single opponent can maximize his utility only via global
cooperation and any colluding alliance cannot get the upper hand. Since a full
cooperation is individually optimal for any single opponent, a stable
cooperation among all players can be achieved. Moreover, we experimentally show
that these strategies can still promote cooperation even when the opponents are
both self-learning and collusive
Selfish Response to Epidemic Propagation
An epidemic spreading in a network calls for a decision on the part of the
network members: They should decide whether to protect themselves or not. Their
decision depends on the trade-off between their perceived risk of being
infected and the cost of being protected. The network members can make
decisions repeatedly, based on information that they receive about the changing
infection level in the network.
We study the equilibrium states reached by a network whose members increase
(resp. decrease) their security deployment when learning that the network
infection is widespread (resp. limited). Our main finding is that the
equilibrium level of infection increases as the learning rate of the members
increases. We confirm this result in three scenarios for the behavior of the
members: strictly rational cost minimizers, not strictly rational, and strictly
rational but split into two response classes. In the first two cases, we
completely characterize the stability and the domains of attraction of the
equilibrium points, even though the first case leads to a differential
inclusion. We validate our conclusions with simulations on human mobility
traces.Comment: 19 pages, 5 figures, submitted to the IEEE Transactions on Automatic
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