72,272 research outputs found
N-Person Bargaining and Strategic Complexity
We investigate the effect of introducing costs of complexity in the n -person unanimity bargaining game. In particular, the paper provides a justification for stationary equilibrium strategies in the class of games where complexity costs matter. As is well-known, in this game every individually rational allocation is sustainable as a Nash equilibrium (also as a subgame perfect equilibrium if players are sufficiently patient and if n > 2). Moreover, delays in agreement are also possible in such equilibria. By limiting ourselves to strategies that can be implemented by a machine (automaton) and by suitably modifying the definition of complexity for the purpose of analysing a single extensive form, we find that complexity costs do not reduce the range of possible allocations but they do limit the amount of delay that can occur in any agreement. In particular, we show that in any n-player game, for any allocation z; an agreement on z at any period t can be sustained as a Nash equilibrium of the machine game with complexity costs if and only if t · n: We use the limit on delay result to establish that, in equilibrium, the machines implement stationary strategies. Finally, we also show that noisy Nash equilibrium” with complexity costs sustain only the unique stationary subgame perfect equilibrium allocation.
1976 Montreal Olympics: Case Study of Project Management Failure
A successful engineering project must include its timely and economic completion. A project management failure can lead to delays and cost overruns. One example of a project that greatly exceeded its projected budget is the construction of the multiple facilities for the 1976 Olympic Games in Montreal. These included the Olympic Stadium, a velodrome for bicycle events, and the Olympic Village to house the athletes. This case study reviews the circumstances of the cost increases and the design decisions and other circumstances that led to them. The difficulties were brought on by an unrealistic schedule to complete the facilities before the fixed start date of the Games, combined with an unusually cavalier attitude toward project costs, exacerbated by political tensions. Although the original cost estimate for the facilities was 1.5 billion, with $830 million for the main stadium alone. Part of the justification for the expense of the facilities was the hope that the facilities would be useful for future athletic events—the record on this is mixed at best. The lessons learned can be applied to other projects to better control costs
Routing Games over Time with FIFO policy
We study atomic routing games where every agent travels both along its
decided edges and through time. The agents arriving on an edge are first lined
up in a \emph{first-in-first-out} queue and may wait: an edge is associated
with a capacity, which defines how many agents-per-time-step can pop from the
queue's head and enter the edge, to transit for a fixed delay. We show that the
best-response optimization problem is not approximable, and that deciding the
existence of a Nash equilibrium is complete for the second level of the
polynomial hierarchy. Then, we drop the rationality assumption, introduce a
behavioral concept based on GPS navigation, and study its worst-case efficiency
ratio to coordination.Comment: Submission to WINE-2017 Deadline was August 2nd AoE, 201
Assessing the Impact of Game Day Schedule and Opponents on Travel Patterns and Route Choice using Big Data Analytics
The transportation system is crucial for transferring people and goods from point A to point B. However, its reliability can be decreased by unanticipated congestion resulting from planned special events. For example, sporting events collect large crowds of people at specific venues on game days and disrupt normal traffic patterns.
The goal of this study was to understand issues related to road traffic management during major sporting events by using widely available INRIX data to compare travel patterns and behaviors on game days against those on normal days. A comprehensive analysis was conducted on the impact of all Nebraska Cornhuskers football games over five years on traffic congestion on five major routes in Nebraska. We attempted to identify hotspots, the unusually high-risk zones in a spatiotemporal space containing traffic congestion that occur on almost all game days. For hotspot detection, we utilized a method called Multi-EigenSpot, which is able to detect multiple hotspots in a spatiotemporal space. With this algorithm, we were able to detect traffic hotspot clusters on the five chosen routes in Nebraska. After detecting the hotspots, we identified the factors affecting the sizes of hotspots and other parameters. The start time of the game and the Cornhuskers’ opponent for a given game are two important factors affecting the number of people coming to Lincoln, Nebraska, on game days. Finally, the Dynamic Bayesian Networks (DBN) approach was applied to forecast the start times and locations of hotspot clusters in 2018 with a weighted mean absolute percentage error (WMAPE) of 13.8%
Revisiting Robustness in Priced Timed Games
Priced timed games are optimal-cost reachability games played between two
players---the controller and the environment---by moving a token along the
edges of infinite graphs of configurations of priced timed automata. The goal
of the controller is to reach a given set of target locations as cheaply as
possible, while the goal of the environment is the opposite. Priced timed games
are known to be undecidable for timed automata with or more clocks, while
they are known to be decidable for automata with clock.
In an attempt to recover decidability for priced timed games Bouyer, Markey,
and Sankur studied robust priced timed games where the environment has the
power to slightly perturb delays proposed by the controller. Unfortunately,
however, they showed that the natural problem of deciding the existence of
optimal limit-strategy---optimal strategy of the controller where the
perturbations tend to vanish in the limit---is undecidable with or more
clocks. In this paper we revisit this problem and improve our understanding of
the decidability of these games. We show that the limit-strategy problem is
already undecidable for a subclass of robust priced timed games with or
more clocks. On a positive side, we show the decidability of the existence of
almost optimal strategies for the same subclass of one-clock robust priced
timed games by adapting a classical construction by Bouyer at al. for one-clock
priced timed games
On the Impact of Fair Best Response Dynamics
In this work we completely characterize how the frequency with which each
player participates in the game dynamics affects the possibility of reaching
efficient states, i.e., states with an approximation ratio within a constant
factor from the price of anarchy, within a polynomially bounded number of best
responses. We focus on the well known class of congestion games and we show
that, if each player is allowed to play at least once and at most times
any best responses, states with approximation ratio times the
price of anarchy are reached after best
responses, and that such a bound is essentially tight also after exponentially
many ones. One important consequence of our result is that the fairness among
players is a necessary and sufficient condition for guaranteeing a fast
convergence to efficient states. This answers the important question of the
maximum order of needed to fast obtain efficient states, left open by
[9,10] and [3], in which fast convergence for constant and very slow
convergence for have been shown, respectively. Finally, we show
that the structure of the game implicitly affects its performances. In
particular, we show that in the symmetric setting, in which all players share
the same set of strategies, the game always converges to an efficient state
after a polynomial number of best responses, regardless of the frequency each
player moves with
The Price of Anarchy in Transportation Networks: Efficiency and Optimality Control
Uncoordinated individuals in human society pursuing their personally optimal
strategies do not always achieve the social optimum, the most beneficial state
to the society as a whole. Instead, strategies form Nash equilibria which are
often socially suboptimal. Society, therefore, has to pay a price of anarchy
for the lack of coordination among its members. Here we assess this price of
anarchy by analyzing the travel times in road networks of several major cities.
Our simulation shows that uncoordinated drivers possibly waste a considerable
amount of their travel time. Counterintuitively,simply blocking certain streets
can partially improve the traffic conditions. We analyze various complex
networks and discuss the possibility of similar paradoxes in physics.Comment: major revisions with multicommodity; Phys. Rev. Lett., accepte
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