2,421 research outputs found
Fragility of the Commons under Prospect-Theoretic Risk Attitudes
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
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?
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
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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