Game theory in solving conflicts on local government level

Game theory is often used while making decisions in situations of conflicted interests. This research studies practical application of game theory with emphasis on applying linear programming, i.e. simplex algorithm while solving problems in game theory domain. Different cases of game theory application in various scientific disciplines went through theoretical analysis. After the analysis was conducted, this paper presented a practical example of solving a situation of conflict on local government level and the efficiency of game theory while making decision

Pricing the Cloud: An Auction Approach

Cloud computing has changed the processing and service modes of information communication technology and has affected the transformation, upgrading and innovation of the IT-related industry systems. The rapid development of cloud computing in business practice has spawned a whole new field of interdisciplinary, providing opportunities and challenges for business management research. One of the critical factors impacting cloud computing is how to price cloud services. An appropriate pricing strategy has important practical means to stakeholders, especially to providers and customers. This study addressed and discussed research findings on cloud computing pricing strategies, such as fixed pricing, bidding pricing, and dynamic pricing. Another key factor for cloud computing is Quality of Service (QoS), such as availability, reliability, latency, security, throughput, capacity, scalability, elasticity, etc. Cloud providers seek to improve QoS to attract more potential customers; while, customers intend to find QoS matching services that do not exceed their budget constraints. Based on the existing study, a hybrid QoS-based pricing mechanism, which consists of subscription and dynamic auction design, is proposed and illustrated to cloud services. The results indicate that our hybrid pricing mechanism has potential to better allocate available cloud resources, aiming at increasing revenues for providers and reducing expenses for customers in practice

Game-Theoretic Resource Pricing and Provisioning Strategies in Cloud Systems

We consider several Software as a Service (SaaS) providers that offer services using the Cloud resources provided by an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider which adopts a pay-per-use scheme similar to the Amazon EC2 service, comprising flat, on demand, and spot virtual machine instances. For this scenario, we study the virtual machine provisioning and spot pricing strategies.We consider a two-stage provisioning scheme. In the first stage, the SaaS providers determine the optimal number of required flat and on demand instances. Then, in the second stage, the IaaS provider sells its unused capacity as spot instances for which the SaaS providers compete by submitting a bid. We study two different IaaS provider pricing strategies: the first assumes the IaaS provider sets a unique price; in the second, instead, the IaaS provider can set different prices for different customers. We model the resulting problem as a Stackelberg game. For each pricing scheme, we show the existence of the game equilibrium and provide the solution algorithms. Through numerical evaluation we compare the provisioning and spot price under the two different pricing strategies as function of the system parameters