23,119 research outputs found
An Experimental Study of the Holdout Problem in a Multilateral Bargaining Game
When an economic exchange requires agreement by multiple independent parties, the potential exists for an individual to strategically delay agreement in an attempt to capture a greater share of the surplus created by the exchange. This holdout problem is a common feature of the land-assembly literature because development frequently requires the assembly of multiple parcels of land. We use experimental methods to examine holdout behavior in a laboratory bargaining game that involves multi-person groups, complementary exchanges, and holdout externalities. The results of six treatments that vary the bargaining institution, number of bargaining periods, and cost of delay demonstrate that holdout is common across institutions and is, on average, a payoff-improving strategy for responders. Both proposers and responders take a more aggressive initial bargaining stance in multi-period bargaining treatments relative to single-period treatments, but take a less aggressive bargaining stance when delay is costly. Nearly all exchanges eventually occur in our multi-period treatments, leading to higher overall efficiency relative to the single-period treatments, both with and without delay costs. [excerpt
Cooperative Precoding/Resource Allocation Games under Spectral Mask and Total Power Constraints
The use of orthogonal signaling schemes such as time-, frequency-, or
code-division multiplexing (T-, F-, CDM) in multi-user systems allows for
power-efficient simple receivers. It is shown in this paper that by using
orthogonal signaling on frequency selective fading channels, the cooperative
Nash bargaining (NB)-based precoding games for multi-user systems, which aim at
maximizing the information rates of all users, are simplified to the
corresponding cooperative resource allocation games. The latter provides
additional practically desired simplifications to transmitter design and
significantly reduces the overhead during user cooperation. The complexity of
the corresponding precoding/resource allocation games, however, depends on the
constraints imposed on the users. If only spectral mask constraints are
present, the corresponding cooperative NB problem can be formulated as a convex
optimization problem and solved efficiently in a distributed manner using dual
decomposition based algorithm. However, the NB problem is non-convex if total
power constraints are also imposed on the users. In this case, the complexity
associate with finding the NB solution is unacceptably high. Therefore, the
multi-user systems are categorized into bandwidth- and power-dominant based on
a bottleneck resource, and different manners of cooperation are developed for
each type of systems for the case of two-users. Such classification guarantees
that the solution obtained in each case is Pareto-optimal and actually can be
identical to the optimal solution, while the complexity is significantly
reduced. Simulation results demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed
cooperative precoding/resource allocation strategies and the reduced complexity
of the proposed algorithms.Comment: 33 pages, 8 figures, Submitted to the IEEE Trans. Signal Processing
in Oct. 200
Bargaining Multiple Issues with Leximin Preferences
Global bargaining problems over a finite number of different issues, are formalized as cartesian products of classical bargaining problems. For maximin and leximin bargainers we characterize global bargaining solutions that are efficient and satisfy the requirement that bargaining separately or globally leads to equivalent outcomes. Global solutions in this class are constructed from the family of monotone path solutions for classical bargaining problems.Global bargaining, maximin preferences, leximin preferences
A Multi-Agent Systems Approach to Microeconomic Foundations of Macro
This paper is part of a broader project that attempts to gener- ate microfoundations for macroeconomics as an emergent property of complex systems. The multi-agents systems approach is seen to produce realistic macro properties from a primitive set of agents that search for satisfactory activities, "jobs", in an informationally constrained, computationally noisy environment. There is frictional and structural unemployment, inflation, excess capacity, fi- nancial instability along with the possibility of relatively smooth expansion. There is no Phillips curve but an inegalitarian distribution of income emerges as fundamental property of the system.Multi-agent system, agent-based models, microeconomic foundations, macroeconomics.
Learning to Reach Agreement in a Continuous Ultimatum Game
It is well-known that acting in an individually rational manner, according to
the principles of classical game theory, may lead to sub-optimal solutions in a
class of problems named social dilemmas. In contrast, humans generally do not
have much difficulty with social dilemmas, as they are able to balance personal
benefit and group benefit. As agents in multi-agent systems are regularly
confronted with social dilemmas, for instance in tasks such as resource
allocation, these agents may benefit from the inclusion of mechanisms thought
to facilitate human fairness. Although many of such mechanisms have already
been implemented in a multi-agent systems context, their application is usually
limited to rather abstract social dilemmas with a discrete set of available
strategies (usually two). Given that many real-world examples of social
dilemmas are actually continuous in nature, we extend this previous work to
more general dilemmas, in which agents operate in a continuous strategy space.
The social dilemma under study here is the well-known Ultimatum Game, in which
an optimal solution is achieved if agents agree on a common strategy. We
investigate whether a scale-free interaction network facilitates agents to
reach agreement, especially in the presence of fixed-strategy agents that
represent a desired (e.g. human) outcome. Moreover, we study the influence of
rewiring in the interaction network. The agents are equipped with
continuous-action learning automata and play a large number of random pairwise
games in order to establish a common strategy. From our experiments, we may
conclude that results obtained in discrete-strategy games can be generalized to
continuous-strategy games to a certain extent: a scale-free interaction network
structure allows agents to achieve agreement on a common strategy, and rewiring
in the interaction network greatly enhances the agents ability to reach
agreement. However, it also becomes clear that some alternative mechanisms,
such as reputation and volunteering, have many subtleties involved and do not
have convincing beneficial effects in the continuous case
- …