7,462 research outputs found
Smooth Inequalities and Equilibrium Inefficiency in Scheduling Games
We study coordination mechanisms for Scheduling Games (with unrelated
machines). In these games, each job represents a player, who needs to choose a
machine for its execution, and intends to complete earliest possible. Our goal
is to design scheduling policies that always admit a pure Nash equilibrium and
guarantee a small price of anarchy for the l_k-norm social cost --- the
objective balances overall quality of service and fairness. We consider
policies with different amount of knowledge about jobs: non-clairvoyant,
strongly-local and local. The analysis relies on the smooth argument together
with adequate inequalities, called smooth inequalities. With this unified
framework, we are able to prove the following results.
First, we study the inefficiency in l_k-norm social costs of a strongly-local
policy SPT and a non-clairvoyant policy EQUI. We show that the price of anarchy
of policy SPT is O(k). We also prove a lower bound of Omega(k/log k) for all
deterministic, non-preemptive, strongly-local and non-waiting policies
(non-waiting policies produce schedules without idle times). These results
ensure that SPT is close to optimal with respect to the class of l_k-norm
social costs. Moreover, we prove that the non-clairvoyant policy EQUI has price
of anarchy O(2^k).
Second, we consider the makespan (l_infty-norm) social cost by making
connection within the l_k-norm functions. We revisit some local policies and
provide simpler, unified proofs from the framework's point of view. With the
highlight of the approach, we derive a local policy Balance. This policy
guarantees a price of anarchy of O(log m), which makes it the currently best
known policy among the anonymous local policies that always admit a pure Nash
equilibrium.Comment: 25 pages, 1 figur
CSMA Local Area Networking under Dynamic Altruism
In this paper, we consider medium access control of local area networks
(LANs) under limited-information conditions as befits a distributed system.
Rather than assuming "by rule" conformance to a protocol designed to regulate
packet-flow rates (e.g., CSMA windowing), we begin with a non-cooperative game
framework and build a dynamic altruism term into the net utility. The effects
of altruism are analyzed at Nash equilibrium for both the ALOHA and CSMA
frameworks in the quasistationary (fictitious play) regime. We consider either
power or throughput based costs of networking, and the cases of identical or
heterogeneous (independent) users/players. In a numerical study we consider
diverse players, and we see that the effects of altruism for similar players
can be beneficial in the presence of significant congestion, but excessive
altruism may lead to underuse of the channel when demand is low
Load Balancing Congestion Games and their Asymptotic Behavior
A central question in routing games has been to establish conditions for the
uniqueness of the equilibrium, either in terms of network topology or in terms
of costs. This question is well understood in two classes of routing games. The
first is the non-atomic routing introduced by Wardrop on 1952 in the context of
road traffic in which each player (car) is infinitesimally small; a single car
has a negligible impact on the congestion. Each car wishes to minimize its
expected delay. Under arbitrary topology, such games are known to have a convex
potential and thus a unique equilibrium. The second framework is splitable
atomic games: there are finitely many players, each controlling the route of a
population of individuals (let them be cars in road traffic or packets in the
communication networks). In this paper, we study two other frameworks of
routing games in which each of several players has an integer number of
connections (which are population of packets) to route and where there is a
constraint that a connection cannot be split. Through a particular game with a
simple three link topology, we identify various novel and surprising properties
of games within these frameworks. We show in particular that equilibria are non
unique even in the potential game setting of Rosenthal with strictly convex
link costs. We further show that non-symmetric equilibria arise in symmetric
networks. I. INTRODUCTION A central question in routing games has been to
establish conditions for the uniqueness of the equilibria, either in terms of
the network topology or in terms of the costs. A survey on these issues is
given in [1]. The question of uniqueness of equilibria has been studied in two
different frameworks. The first, which we call F1, is the non-atomic routing
introduced by Wardrop on 1952 in the context of road traffic in which each
player (car) is infinitesimally small; a single car has a negligible impact on
the congestion. Each car wishes to minimize its expected delay. Under arbitrary
topology, such games are known to have a convex potential and thus have a
unique equilibrium [2]. The second framework, denoted by F2, is splitable
atomic games. There are finitely many players, each controlling the route of a
population of individuals. This type of games have already been studied in the
context of road traffic by Haurie and Marcotte [3] but have become central in
the telecom community to model routing decisions of Internet Service Providers
that can decide how to split the traffic of their subscribers among various
routes so as to minimize network congestion [4]. In this paper we study
properties of equilibria in two other frameworks of routing games which exhibit
surprisin
Budget-restricted utility games with ordered strategic decisions
We introduce the concept of budget games. Players choose a set of tasks and
each task has a certain demand on every resource in the game. Each resource has
a budget. If the budget is not enough to satisfy the sum of all demands, it has
to be shared between the tasks. We study strategic budget games, where the
budget is shared proportionally. We also consider a variant in which the order
of the strategic decisions influences the distribution of the budgets. The
complexity of the optimal solution as well as existence, complexity and quality
of equilibria are analyzed. Finally, we show that the time an ordered budget
game needs to convergence towards an equilibrium may be exponential
A game theoretic approach to a peer-to-peer cloud storage model
Classical cloud storage based on external data providers has been recognized
to suffer from a number of drawbacks. This is due to its inherent centralized
architecture which makes it vulnerable to external attacks, malware, technical
failures, as well to the large premium charged for business purposes. In this
paper, we propose an alternative distributed peer-to-peer cloud storage model
which is based on the observation that the users themselves often have
available storage capabilities to be offered in principle to other users. Our
set-up is that of a network of users connected through a graph, each of them
being at the same time a source of data to be stored externally and a possible
storage resource. We cast the peer-to-peer storage model to a Potential Game
and we propose an original decentralized algorithm which makes units interact,
cooperate, and store a complete back up of their data on their connected
neighbors. We present theoretical results on the algorithm as well a good
number of simulations which validate our approach.Comment: 10 page
Markov-Perfect Rent Dissipation in Rights-Based Fisheries
We present a general, dynamic model of within-season harvesting competition in a fishery managed with individual transferable quotas. Markov-Perfect equilibrium harvesting and quota purchase strategies are derived using numerical collocation methods. We identify rent loss caused by a heterogeneous-in-value fish stock, congestion on the fishing ground, revenue competition and stock uncertainty. Our results show that biological, technological and market conditions under which rents will be dissipated in a standard individual transferable quota program are fairly special. These findings provide new insights for designing rights-based programs capable of generating resource rent in marine fisheries.Markov Perfect Nash equilibrium; individual transferable quotas; production externalities; resource rent.
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