2,421 research outputs found

    Fragility of the Commons under Prospect-Theoretic Risk Attitudes

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    We study a common-pool resource game where the resource experiences failure with a probability that grows with the aggregate investment in the resource. To capture decision making under such uncertainty, we model each player's risk preference according to the value function from prospect theory. We show the existence and uniqueness of a pure Nash equilibrium when the players have heterogeneous risk preferences and under certain assumptions on the rate of return and failure probability of the resource. Greater competition, vis-a-vis the number of players, increases the failure probability at the Nash equilibrium; we quantify this effect by obtaining bounds on the ratio of the failure probability at the Nash equilibrium to the failure probability under investment by a single user. We further show that heterogeneity in attitudes towards loss aversion leads to higher failure probability of the resource at the equilibrium.Comment: Accepted for publication in Games and Economic Behavior, 201

    Game Theory in Distributed Systems Security: Foundations, Challenges, and Future Directions

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    Many of our critical infrastructure systems and personal computing systems have a distributed computing systems structure. The incentives to attack them have been growing rapidly as has their attack surface due to increasing levels of connectedness. Therefore, we feel it is time to bring in rigorous reasoning to secure such systems. The distributed system security and the game theory technical communities can come together to effectively address this challenge. In this article, we lay out the foundations from each that we can build upon to achieve our goals. Next, we describe a set of research challenges for the community, organized into three categories -- analytical, systems, and integration challenges, each with "short term" time horizon (2-3 years) and "long term" (5-10 years) items. This article was conceived of through a community discussion at the 2022 NSF SaTC PI meeting.Comment: 11 pages in IEEE Computer Society magazine format, including references and author bios. There is 1 figur

    Load Shifting in the Smart Grid: To Participate or Not?

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    Demand-side management (DSM) has emerged as an important smart grid feature that allows utility companies to maintain desirable grid loads. However, the success of DSM is contingent on active customer participation. Indeed, most existing DSM studies are based on game-theoretic models that assume customers will act rationally and will voluntarily participate in DSM. In contrast, in this paper, the impact of customers' subjective behavior on each other's DSM decisions is explicitly accounted for. In particular, a noncooperative game is formulated between grid customers in which each customer can decide on whether to participate in DSM or not. In this game, customers seek to minimize a cost function that reflects their total payment for electricity. Unlike classical game-theoretic DSM studies which assume that customers are rational in their decision-making, a novel approach is proposed, based on the framework of prospect theory (PT), to explicitly incorporate the impact of customer behavior on DSM decisions. To solve the proposed game under both conventional game theory and PT, a new algorithm based on fictitious player is proposed using which the game will reach an epsilon-mixed Nash equilibrium. Simulation results assess the impact of customer behavior on demand-side management. In particular, the overall participation level and grid load can depend significantly on the rationality level of the players and their risk aversion tendency.Comment: 9 pages, 7 figures, journal, accepte

    On a Generic Security Game Model

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    To protect the systems exposed to the Internet against attacks, a security system with the capability to engage with the attacker is needed. There have been attempts to model the engagement/interactions between users, both benign and malicious, and network administrators as games. Building on such works, we present a game model which is generic enough to capture various modes of such interactions. The model facilitates stochastic games with imperfect information. The information is imperfect due to erroneous sensors leading to incorrect perception of the current state by the players. To model this error in perception distributed over other multiple states, we use Euclidean distances between the outputs of the sensors. We build a 5-state game to represent the interaction of the administrator with the user. The states correspond to 1) the user being out of the system in the Internet, and after logging in to the system; 2) having low privileges; 3) having high privileges; 4) when he successfully attacks and 5) gets trapped in a honeypot by the administrator. Each state has its own action set. We present the game with a distinct perceived action set corresponding to each distinct information set of these states. The model facilitates stochastic games with imperfect information. The imperfect information is due to erroneous sensors leading to incorrect perception of the current state by the players. To model this error in perception distributed over the states, we use Euclidean distances between outputs of the sensors. A numerical simulation of an example game is presented to show the evaluation of rewards to the players and the preferred strategies. We also present the conditions for formulating the strategies when dealing with more than one attacker and making collaborations.Comment: 31 page
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