186 research outputs found
Computer Science and Game Theory: A Brief Survey
There has been a remarkable increase in work at the interface of computer
science and game theory in the past decade. In this article I survey some of
the main themes of work in the area, with a focus on the work in computer
science. Given the length constraints, I make no attempt at being
comprehensive, especially since other surveys are also available, and a
comprehensive survey book will appear shortly.Comment: To appear; Palgrave Dictionary of Economic
Bounding the Inefficiency of Altruism Through Social Contribution Games
We introduce a new class of games, called social contribution games (SCGs),
where each player's individual cost is equal to the cost he induces on society
because of his presence. Our results reveal that SCGs constitute useful
abstractions of altruistic games when it comes to the analysis of the robust
price of anarchy. We first show that SCGs are altruism-independently smooth,
i.e., the robust price of anarchy of these games remains the same under
arbitrary altruistic extensions. We then devise a general reduction technique
that enables us to reduce the problem of establishing smoothness for an
altruistic extension of a base game to a corresponding SCG. Our reduction
applies whenever the base game relates to a canonical SCG by satisfying a
simple social contribution boundedness property. As it turns out, several
well-known games satisfy this property and are thus amenable to our reduction
technique. Examples include min-sum scheduling games, congestion games, second
price auctions and valid utility games. Using our technique, we derive mostly
tight bounds on the robust price of anarchy of their altruistic extensions. For
the majority of the mentioned game classes, the results extend to the more
differentiated friendship setting. As we show, our reduction technique covers
this model if the base game satisfies three additional natural properties
The path player game: A network game from the point of view of the network providers
We introduce the path player game, a noncooperative network game with a continuum of mutually dependent set of strategies. This game models network flows from the point of view of competing network operators. The players are represented by paths in the network. They have to decide how much flow shall be routed along their paths. The competitive nature
of the game is due to the following two aspects: First, a capacity bound
on the overall network flow links the decisions of the players. Second, edges
may be shared by several players which might have conflicting goals. In this paper, we prove the existence of feasible and pure-strategy equilibria in path player games, which is a non-trivial task due to non-continuity of payoff functions and the infinite, mutually dependent strategy sets. We analyze
different instances of path player games in more detail and present characterizations of equilibria for these cases
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