Structural Results for Decentralized Stochastic Control with a Word-of-Mouth Communication

In this paper, we analyze a network of agents that communicate through the ``word of mouth," in which, every agent communicates only with its neighbors. We introduce the prescription approach, present some of its properties and show that it leads to a new information state. We also state preliminary structural results for optimal control strategies in systems that evolve using word-of-mouth communication. The proposed approach can be generalized to analyze several decentralized systems

On Team Decision Problems with Nonclassical Information Structures

In this paper, we consider sequential dynamic team decision problems with nonclassical information structures. First, we address the problem from the point of view of a "manager" who seeks to derive the optimal strategy of the team in a centralized process. We derive structural results that yield an information state for the team which does not depend on the control strategy, and thus it can lead to a dynamic programming decomposition where the optimization problem is over the space of the team's decisions. We, then, derive structural results for each team member that yield an information state which does not depend on their control strategy, and thus it can lead to a dynamic programming decomposition where the optimization problem for each team member is over the space of their decisions. Finally, we show that the control strategy of each team member is the same as the one derived by the manager. We present an illustrative example of a dynamic team with a delayed sharing information structure.Comment: 16 page