Approximated Cycles in TU-Games

Non-balanced TU-games, which are games with empty core, can also be characterized by the existence of certain type of cycles of pre-imputations. A particular sub-class of these cycles is that of maximal U-cycles. They show up in connection with the application of a transfer scheme to games with empty core, although this transfer scheme was originally designed however, to reach a point in the core of a balanced TU-game. While the appearance of one of such cycles is enough to detect the non-balancedness of the game, it is still an open question if every non- balanced game has a maximal U-cycle. The aim of this note is to show, however, that there are always, in non-balanced games, approximated maximal U-cycles sharing with the true maximal U-cycles all their good properties.Sociedad Argentina de Informática e Investigación Operativa (SADIO

A Survey of Models of Network Formation: Stability and Efficiency

I survey the recent literature on the formation of networks. I provide definitions of network games, a number of examples of models from the literature, and discuss some of what is known about the (in)compatibility of overall societal welfare with individual incentives to form and sever links

Designing Network Protocols for Good Equilibria

Designing and deploying a network protocol determines the rules by which end users interact with each other and with the network. We consider the problem of designing a protocol to optimize the equilibrium behavior of a network with selfish users. We consider network cost-sharing games, where the set of Nash equilibria depends fundamentally on the choice of an edge cost-sharing protocol. Previous research focused on the Shapley protocol, in which the cost of each edge is shared equally among its users. We systematically study the design of optimal cost-sharing protocols for undirected and directed graphs, single-sink and multicommodity networks, and different measures of the inefficiency of equilibria. Our primary technical tool is a precise characterization of the cost-sharing protocols that induce only network games with pure-strategy Nash equilibria. We use this characterization to prove, among other results, that the Shapley protocol is optimal in directed graphs and that simple priority protocols are essentially optimal in undirected graphs

Dominating Set Games

In this paper we study cooperative cost games arising from domination problems on graphs.We introduce three games to model the cost allocation problem and we derive a necessary and su cient condition for the balancedness of all three games.Furthermore we study concavity of these games.game theory;cost allocation;cooperative games

Signed Tropical Convexity

We establish a new notion of tropical convexity for signed tropical numbers. We provide several equivalent descriptions involving balance relations and intersections of open halfspaces as well as the image of a union of polytopes over Puiseux series and hyperoperations. Along the way, we deduce a new Farkas\u27 lemma and Fourier-Motzkin elimination without the non-negativity restriction on the variables. This leads to a Minkowski-Weyl theorem for polytopes over the signed tropical numbers

Counting With Irrational Tiles

We introduce and study the number of tilings of unit height rectangles with irrational tiles. We prove that the class of sequences of these numbers coincides with the class of diagonals of N-rational generating functions and a class of certain binomial multisums. We then give asymptotic applications and establish connections to hypergeometric functions and Catalan numbers