Chinese postman games with multi-located players

This paper analyses Chinese postman games with multi-located players, which generalize Chinese postman games by dropping the one-to-one relation between edges and players. In our model, we allow players to be located on more than one edge, but at most one player is located on each edge. The one-to-one relation between edges and players is essential for the equivalence between Chinese postman-totally balanced and Chinese postman-submodular graphs shown in the literature. We illustrate the invalidity of this result in our model. Besides, the location of the post office has a relevant role in the submodularity and totally balancedness of Chinese postman games with multi-located players. Therefore, we focus on sufficient conditions on the assignment of players to edges to ensure submodularity of Chinese postman games with multi-located players, independently of the associated travel costs. Moreover, we provide some insights on the difficulty of finding necessary conditions on assignment functions to this end

Proportionate flow shop games

htmlabstractIn a proportionate flow shop problem several jobs have to be processed through a fixed sequence of machines and the processing time of each job is equal on all machines. By identifying jobs with agents, whose costs linearly depend on the completion time of their jobs, and assuming an initial processing order on the jobs, we face two problems: the first one is how to obtain an optimal order that minimizes the total processing cost, the second one is how to allocate the cost savings obtained by ordering the jobs optimally. In this paper we focus on the allocation problem. PFS games are defined as cooperative games associated to proportionate flow shop problems. It is seen that PFS games have a nonempty core. Moreover, it is shown that PFS games are convex if the jobs are initially ordered in decreasing urgency. For this case an explicit game independent expression for the Shapley value is provid

Nontransferable utility bankruptcy games

In this paper, we analyze bankruptcy problems with nontransferable utility (NTU) from a game theoretical perspective by redefining corresponding NTU-bankruptcy games in a tailor-made way. It is shown that NTU-bankruptcy games are both coalition-merge convex and ordinally convex. Generalizing the notions of core cover and compromise stability for transferable utility (TU) games to NTU-games, we also show that each NTU-bankruptcy game is compromise stable. Thus, NTU-bankruptcy games are shown to retain the two characterizing properties of TU-bankruptcy games: convexity and compromise stability. As a first example of a game theoretical NTU-bankruptcy rule, we analyze the adjusted proportional rule and show that this rule corresponds to the compromise value of NTU-bankruptcy games

Competitive environments and protective behavior

The class of two-person competition games is introduced and analyzed. For any game in this class the set of Nash equilibria is convex and all Nash equilibria lead to the same payoff vector. Competition games are compared to other competitive environments such as unilaterally competitive games and rivalry games. Moreover, protective behavior within competitive environments is analyzed. For matrix games it is known that protective strategies profiles exactly correspond to proper equilibria. It is shown that this result can be extended to the class of unilaterally competitive games.Competitive environments Unilaterally competitive games Rivalry games Competition games Protective strategies