Modeling economic systems as locally-constructive sequential games

Real-world economies are open-ended dynamic systems consisting of heterogeneous interacting participants. Human participants are decision-makers who strategically take into account the past actions and potential future actions of other participants. All participants are forced to be locally constructive, meaning their actions at any given time must be based on their local states; and participant actions at any given time affect future local states. Taken together, these essential properties imply real-world economies are locally-constructive sequential games. This paper discusses a modeling approach, Agent-based Computational Economics, that permits researchers to study economic systems from this point of view. ACE modeling principles and objectives are first concisely presented and explained. The remainder of the paper then highlights challenging issues and edgier explorations that ACE researchers are currently pursuing

Distributed population dynamics : optimization and control applications

© 2017 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.Population dynamics have been widely used in the design of learning and control systems for networked engineering applications, where the information dependency among elements of the network has become a relevant issue. Classic population dynamics (e.g., replicator, logit choice, Smith, and projection) require full information to evolve to the solution (Nash equilibrium). The main reason is that classic population dynamics are deduced by assuming well-mixed populations, which limits the applications where this theory can be implemented. In this paper, we extend the concept of population dynamics for nonwell-mixed populations in order to deal with distributed information structures that are characterized by noncomplete graphs. Although the distributed population dynamics proposed in this paper use partial information, they preserve similar characteristics and properties of their classic counterpart. Specifically, we prove mass conservation and convergence to Nash equilibrium. To illustrate the performance of the proposed dynamics, we show some applications in the solution of optimization problems, classic games, and the design of distributed controllers.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Pure Nash Equilibria and Best-Response Dynamics in Random Games

In finite games mixed Nash equilibria always exist, but pure equilibria may fail to exist. To assess the relevance of this nonexistence, we consider games where the payoffs are drawn at random. In particular, we focus on games where a large number of players can each choose one of two possible strategies, and the payoffs are i.i.d. with the possibility of ties. We provide asymptotic results about the random number of pure Nash equilibria, such as fast growth and a central limit theorem, with bounds for the approximation error. Moreover, by using a new link between percolation models and game theory, we describe in detail the geometry of Nash equilibria and show that, when the probability of ties is small, a best-response dynamics reaches a Nash equilibrium with a probability that quickly approaches one as the number of players grows. We show that a multitude of phase transitions depend only on a single parameter of the model, that is, the probability of having ties.Comment: 29 pages, 7 figure

Issues in providing a reliable multicast facility

Issues involved in point-to-multipoint communication are presented and the literature for proposed solutions and approaches surveyed. Particular attention is focused on the ideas and implementations that align with the requirements of the environment of interest. The attributes of multicast receiver groups that might lead to useful classifications, what the functionality of a management scheme should be, and how the group management module can be implemented are examined. The services that multicasting facilities can offer are presented, followed by mechanisms within the communications protocol that implements these services. The metrics of interest when evaluating a reliable multicast facility are identified and applied to four transport layer protocols that incorporate reliable multicast

Arguing Using Opponent Models

Peer reviewedPostprin

A Markov state modelling approach to characterizing the punctuated equilibrium dynamics of stochastic evolutionary games

Stochastic evolutionary games often share a dynamic property called punctuated equilibrium; this means that their sample paths exhibit long periods of stasis near one population state which are infrequently interrupted by switching events after which the sample paths stay close to a different population state, again for a long period of time. This has been described in the literature as a favorable property of stochastic evolutionary games. The methods used so far in stochastic evolutionary game theory, however, do not fully characterize these dynamics. We present an approach that aims at exposing the punctuated equilibrium dynamics by constructing Markov models on a reduced state space which approximate well this dynamic behavior. Besides having good approximation properties, the approach allows a simulation-based algorithm, which is appealing in the case of complex games