Infinite-Duration Bidding Games

Two-player games on graphs are widely studied in formal methods as they model the interaction between a system and its environment. The game is played by moving a token throughout a graph to produce an infinite path. There are several common modes to determine how the players move the token through the graph; e.g., in turn-based games the players alternate turns in moving the token. We study the {\em bidding} mode of moving the token, which, to the best of our knowledge, has never been studied in infinite-duration games. The following bidding rule was previously defined and called Richman bidding. Both players have separate {\em budgets}, which sum up to $1$. In each turn, a bidding takes place: Both players submit bids simultaneously, where a bid is legal if it does not exceed the available budget, and the higher bidder pays his bid to the other player and moves the token. The central question studied in bidding games is a necessary and sufficient initial budget for winning the game: a {\em threshold} budget in a vertex is a value $t \in [0,1]$ such that if Player $1$'s budget exceeds $t$, he can win the game, and if Player $2$'s budget exceeds $1-t$, he can win the game. Threshold budgets were previously shown to exist in every vertex of a reachability game, which have an interesting connection with {\em random-turn} games -- a sub-class of simple stochastic games in which the player who moves is chosen randomly. We show the existence of threshold budgets for a qualitative class of infinite-duration games, namely parity games, and a quantitative class, namely mean-payoff games. The key component of the proof is a quantitative solution to strongly-connected mean-payoff bidding games in which we extend the connection with random-turn games to these games, and construct explicit optimal strategies for both players.Comment: A short version appeared in CONCUR 2017. The paper is accepted to JAC

Determinacy in Discrete-Bidding Infinite-Duration Games

In two-player games on graphs, the players move a token through a graph to produce an infinite path, which determines the winner of the game. Such games are central in formal methods since they model the interaction between a non-terminating system and its environment. In bidding games the players bid for the right to move the token: in each round, the players simultaneously submit bids, and the higher bidder moves the token and pays the other player. Bidding games are known to have a clean and elegant mathematical structure that relies on the ability of the players to submit arbitrarily small bids. Many applications, however, require a fixed granularity for the bids, which can represent, for example, the monetary value expressed in cents. We study, for the first time, the combination of discrete-bidding and infinite-duration games. Our most important result proves that these games form a large determined subclass of concurrent games, where determinacy is the strong property that there always exists exactly one player who can guarantee winning the game. In particular, we show that, in contrast to non-discrete bidding games, the mechanism with which tied bids are resolved plays an important role in discrete-bidding games. We study several natural tie-breaking mechanisms and show that, while some do not admit determinacy, most natural mechanisms imply determinacy for every pair of initial budgets

Bidding Mechanisms in Graph Games

In two-player games on graphs, the players move a token through a graph to produce a finite or infinite path, which determines the qualitative winner or quantitative payoff of the game. We study bidding games in which the players bid for the right to move the token. Several bidding rules were studied previously. In Richman bidding, in each round, the players simultaneously submit bids, and the higher bidder moves the token and pays the other player. Poorman bidding is similar except that the winner of the bidding pays the "bank" rather than the other player. Taxman bidding spans the spectrum between Richman and poorman bidding. They are parameterized by a constant tau in [0,1]: portion tau of the winning bid is paid to the other player, and portion 1-tau to the bank. While finite-duration (reachability) taxman games have been studied before, we present, for the first time, results on infinite-duration taxman games. It was previously shown that both Richman and poorman infinite-duration games with qualitative objectives reduce to reachability games, and we show a similar result here. Our most interesting results concern quantitative taxman games, namely mean-payoff games, where poorman and Richman bidding differ significantly. A central quantity in these games is the ratio between the two players\u27 initial budgets. While in poorman mean-payoff games, the optimal payoff of a player depends on the initial ratio, in Richman bidding, the payoff depends only on the structure of the game. In both games the optimal payoffs can be found using (different) probabilistic connections with random-turn games in which in each turn, instead of bidding, a coin is tossed to determine which player moves. While the value with Richman bidding equals the value of a random-turn game with an un-biased coin, with poorman bidding, the bias in the coin is the initial ratio of the budgets. We give a complete classification of mean-payoff taxman games that is based on a probabilistic connection: the value of a taxman bidding game with parameter tau and initial ratio r, equals the value of a random-turn game that uses a coin with bias F(tau, r) = (r+tau * (1-r))/(1+tau). Thus, we show that Richman bidding is the exception; namely, for every tau <1, the value of the game depends on the initial ratio. Our proof technique simplifies and unifies the previous proof techniques for both Richman and poorman bidding

Determinacy in Discrete-Bidding Infinite-Duration Games

In two-player games on graphs, the players move a token through a graph to produce an infinite path, which determines the winner of the game. Such games are central in formal methods since they model the interaction between a non-terminating system and its environment. In bidding games the players bid for the right to move the token: in each round, the players simultaneously submit bids, and the higher bidder moves the token and pays the other player. Bidding games are known to have a clean and elegant mathematical structure that relies on the ability of the players to submit arbitrarily small bids. Many applications, however, require a fixed granularity for the bids, which can represent, for example, the monetary value expressed in cents. We study, for the first time, the combination of discrete-bidding and infinite-duration games. Our most important result proves that these games form a large determined subclass of concurrent games, where determinacy is the strong property that there always exists exactly one player who can guarantee winning the game. In particular, we show that, in contrast to non-discrete bidding games, the mechanism with which tied bids are resolved plays an important role in discrete-bidding games. We study several natural tie-breaking mechanisms and show that, while some do not admit determinacy, most natural mechanisms imply determinacy for every pair of initial budgets

Infinite-Duration Poorman-Bidding Games

In two-player games on graphs, the players move a token through a graph to produce an infinite path, which determines the winner or payoff of the game. Such games are central in formal verification since they model the interaction between a non-terminating system and its environment. We study bidding games in which the players bid for the right to move the token. Two bidding rules have been defined. In Richman bidding, in each round, the players simultaneously submit bids, and the higher bidder moves the token and pays the other player. Poorman bidding is similar except that the winner of the bidding pays the “bank” rather than the other player. While poorman reachability games have been studied before, we present, for the first time, results on infinite-duration poorman games. A central quantity in these games is the ratio between the two players’ initial budgets. The questions we study concern a necessary and sufficient ratio with which a player can achieve a goal. For reachability objectives, such threshold ratios are known to exist for both bidding rules. We show that the properties of poorman reachability games extend to complex qualitative objectives such as parity, similarly to the Richman case. Our most interesting results concern quantitative poorman games, namely poorman mean-payoff games, where we construct optimal strategies depending on the initial ratio, by showing a connection with random-turn based games. The connection in itself is interesting, because it does not hold for reachability poorman games. We also solve the complexity problems that arise in poorman bidding games

Repeated games with asymmetric information and random price fluctuations at finance markets : the case of countable state space

This paper is concerned with multistage bidding models introduced by De Meyer and Moussa Saley (2002) to analyze the evolution of the price system at finance markets with asymmetric information. The zero-sum repeated games with incomplete information are considered modeling the bidding with countable sets of possible prices and admissible bids. It is shown that, if the liquidation price of a share has a finite variance, then the sequence of values of n-step games is bounded and converges to the value of the game with infinite number of steps. We construct explicitly the optimal strategies for this game. The optimal strategy of Player 1 (the insider) generates a symmetric random walk of posterior mathematical expectations of liquidation price with absorption. The expected duration of this random walk is equal to the initial variance of liquidation price. The guaranteed total gain of Player 1 (the value of the game) is equal to this expected duration multiplied with the fixed gain per step.Multistage bidding, asymmetric information, repeated games, optimal strategy.

LIPIcs

Two-player games on graphs are widely studied in formal methods as they model the interaction between a system and its environment. The game is played by moving a token throughout a graph to produce an infinite path. There are several common modes to determine how the players move the token through the graph; e.g., in turn-based games the players alternate turns in moving the token. We study the bidding mode of moving the token, which, to the best of our knowledge, has never been studied in infinite-duration games. Both players have separate budgets, which sum up to $1$. In each turn, a bidding takes place. Both players submit bids simultaneously, and a bid is legal if it does not exceed the available budget. The winner of the bidding pays his bid to the other player and moves the token. For reachability objectives, repeated bidding games have been studied and are called Richman games. There, a central question is the existence and computation of threshold budgets; namely, a value t\in [0,1] such that if\PO's budget exceeds $t$, he can win the game, and if\PT's budget exceeds 1-t, he can win the game. We focus on parity games and mean-payoff games. We show the existence of threshold budgets in these games, and reduce the problem of finding them to Richman games. We also determine the strategy-complexity of an optimal strategy. Our most interesting result shows that memoryless strategies suffice for mean-payoff bidding games