12,564 research outputs found

    Collocation Games and Their Application to Distributed Resource Management

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    We introduce Collocation Games as the basis of a general framework for modeling, analyzing, and facilitating the interactions between the various stakeholders in distributed systems in general, and in cloud computing environments in particular. Cloud computing enables fixed-capacity (processing, communication, and storage) resources to be offered by infrastructure providers as commodities for sale at a fixed cost in an open marketplace to independent, rational parties (players) interested in setting up their own applications over the Internet. Virtualization technologies enable the partitioning of such fixed-capacity resources so as to allow each player to dynamically acquire appropriate fractions of the resources for unencumbered use. In such a paradigm, the resource management problem reduces to that of partitioning the entire set of applications (players) into subsets, each of which is assigned to fixed-capacity cloud resources. If the infrastructure and the various applications are under a single administrative domain, this partitioning reduces to an optimization problem whose objective is to minimize the overall deployment cost. In a marketplace, in which the infrastructure provider is interested in maximizing its own profit, and in which each player is interested in minimizing its own cost, it should be evident that a global optimization is precisely the wrong framework. Rather, in this paper we use a game-theoretic framework in which the assignment of players to fixed-capacity resources is the outcome of a strategic "Collocation Game". Although we show that determining the existence of an equilibrium for collocation games in general is NP-hard, we present a number of simplified, practically-motivated variants of the collocation game for which we establish convergence to a Nash Equilibrium, and for which we derive convergence and price of anarchy bounds. In addition to these analytical results, we present an experimental evaluation of implementations of some of these variants for cloud infrastructures consisting of a collection of multidimensional resources of homogeneous or heterogeneous capacities. Experimental results using trace-driven simulations and synthetically generated datasets corroborate our analytical results and also illustrate how collocation games offer a feasible distributed resource management alternative for autonomic/self-organizing systems, in which the adoption of a global optimization approach (centralized or distributed) would be neither practical nor justifiable.NSF (CCF-0820138, CSR-0720604, EFRI-0735974, CNS-0524477, CNS-052016, CCR-0635102); Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana; COLCIENCIAS–Instituto Colombiano para el Desarrollo de la Ciencia y la Tecnología "Francisco José de Caldas

    Cooperative game theory and its application to natural, environmental, and water resource issues : 2. application to natural and environmental resources

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    This paper provides a review of various applications of cooperative game theory (CGT) to issues of natural and environmental resources. With an increase in the level of competition over environmental and natural resources, the incidents of disputes have been at the center of allocation agreements. The paper reviews the cases of common pool resources such as fisheries and forests, and cases of environmental pollution such as acid rain, flow, and stock pollution. In addition to providing examples of cooperative solutions to allocation problems, the conclusion from this review suggests that cooperation over scarce environmental and natural resources is possible under a variety of physical conditions and institutional arrangements. CGT applications to international fishery disputes are especially useful in that they have been making headway in policy-related agreements among states and regions of the world. Forest applications are more local in nature, but of great relevance in solving disputes among communities and various levels of governments.Environmental Economics&Policies,Fisheries&Aquaculture,Common Property Resource Development,Economic Theory&Research,Ecosystems and Natural Habitats

    A Compromise Stable Extension of Bankruptcy Games: Multipurpose Resource Allocation

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    This paper considers situations characterized by a common-pool resource, which needs to be divided among agents. Each of the agents has some claim on this pool and an individual reward function for assigned resources. This paper analyzes not only the problem of max- imizing the total joint reward, but also the allocation of these rewards among the agents. Analyzing these situations a new class of transferable utility games is introduced, called multipurpose resource games. These games are based on the bankruptcy model, as intro- duced by O'Neill (1982). It is shown that every multipurpose resource game is compromise stable. Moreover, an explicit expression for the nucleolus of these games is provided.bankruptcy games;compromise stability;nucleolus

    Applications of Negotiation Theory to Water Issues

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    The purpose of the paper is to review the applications of non-cooperative bargaining theory to water related issues – which fall in the category of formal models of negotiation. The ultimate aim is that to, on the one hand, identify the conditions under which agreements are likely to emerge, and their characteristics; and, on the other hand, to support policy makers in devising the “rules of the game” that could help obtain a desired result. Despite the fact that allocation of natural resources, especially of trans-boundary nature, has all the characteristics of a negotiation problem, there are not many applications of formal negotiation theory to the issue. Therefore, this paper first discusses the non-cooperative bargaining models applied to water allocation problems found in the literature. Particular attention will be given to those directly modelling the process of negotiation, although some attempts at finding strategies to maintain the efficient allocation solution will also be illustrated. In addition, this paper will focus on Negotiation Support Systems (NSS), developed to support the process of negotiation. This field of research is still relatively new, however, and NSS have not yet found much use in real life negotiation. The paper will conclude by highlighting the key remaining gaps in the literature.Negotiation theory, Water, Agreeements, Stochasticity, Stakeholders

    The Robustness of ‘Enemy-of-My-Enemy-is-My-Friend’ Alliances

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    This paper examines the robustness of alliance formation in a three-player, two-stage game in which each of two players compete against a third player in disjoint sets of contests. Although the players with the common opponent share no common interests, we find that under the lottery contest success function (CSF) there exists a range of parameter configurations in which the players with the common opponent have incentive to form an alliance involving a pre-conflict transfer of resources. Models that utilize the lottery CSF typically yield qualitatively different results from those arising in models with the auction CSF (Fang 2002). However, under the lottery and the auction CSFs, the parameter configurations within which players with a common opponent form an alliance are closely related. Our results, thus, provide a partial robustness result for ‘enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend’ alliances.Alliance Formation, Contests, Economics of Alliances, Conflict
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