Related papers: Strategic Cooperation in Cost Sharing Games
We introduce a framework for studying the effect of cooperation on the quality of outcomes in utility games. Our framework is a coalitional analog of the smoothness framework of non-cooperative games. Coalitional smoothness implies bounds…
We study strong equilibria in symmetric capacitated cost-sharing games. In these games, a graph with designated source $s$ and sink $t$ is given, and each edge is associated with some cost. Each agent chooses strategically an $s$-$t$ path,…
We study a general scenario of simultaneous contests that allocate prizes based on equal sharing: each contest awards its prize to all players who satisfy some contest-specific criterion, and the value of this prize to a winner decreases as…
In cost sharing games, the existence and efficiency of pure Nash equilibria fundamentally depends on the method that is used to share the resources' costs. We consider a general class of resource allocation problems in which a set of…
We introduce natural strategic games on graphs, which capture the idea of coordination in a local setting. We study the existence of equilibria that are resilient to coalitional deviations of unbounded and bounded size (i.e., strong…
We present a new class of vertex cover and set cover games. The price of anarchy bounds match the best known constant factor approximation guarantees for the centralized optimization problems for linear and also for submodular costs -- in…
The emergence of new communication technologies allows us to expand our understanding of distributed control and consider collaborative decision-making paradigms. With collaborative algorithms, certain local decision-making entities (or…
We study the inefficiency of equilibria for various classes of games when players are (partially) altruistic. We model altruistic behavior by assuming that player i's perceived cost is a convex combination of 1-\alpha_i times his direct…
This paper investigates design of noncooperative games from an optimization and control theoretic perspective. Pricing mechanisms are used as a design tool to ensure that the Nash equilibrium of a fairly general class of noncooperative…
The cost-sharing connection game is a variant of routing games on a network. In this model, given a directed graph with edge costs and edge capacities, each agent wants to construct a path from a source to a sink with low cost. The users…
We study stable matching problems in networks where players are embedded in a social context, and may incorporate friendship relations or altruism into their decisions. Each player is a node in a social network and strives to form a good…
Sharing economy is a distributed peer-to-peer economic paradigm, which gives rise to a variety of social interactions for economic purposes. One fundamental distributed decision-making process is coalition formation for sharing certain…
Studying the impact of cooperation in strategic settings is one of the cornerstones of algorithmic game theory. Intuitively, allowing more cooperation yields equilibria that are more beneficial for the society of agents. However, for many…
In classical job-scheduling games, each job behaves as a selfish player, choosing a machine to minimize its own completion time. To reduce the equilibria inefficiency, coordination mechanisms are employed, allowing each machine to follow…
The design of distributed algorithms is central to the study of multiagent systems control. In this paper, we consider a class of combinatorial cost-minimization problems and propose a framework for designing distributed algorithms with a…
We consider non-cooperative unsplittable congestion games where players share resources, and each player's strategy is pure and consists of a subset of the resources on which it applies a fixed weight. Such games represent unsplittable…
A recent body of experimental literature has studied empirical game-theoretical analysis, in which we have partial knowledge of a game, consisting of observations of a subset of the pure-strategy profiles and their associated payoffs to…
We study strong equilibria in network creation games. These form a classical and well-studied class of games where a set of players form a network by buying edges to their neighbors at a cost of a fixed parameter $\alpha$. The cost of a…
Coordination games have been of interest to game theorists, economists, and ecologists for many years to study such problems as the emergence of local conventions and the evolution of cooperative behavior. Approaches for understanding the…
This paper investigates the potential benefits of cooperation in scenarios where finitely many agents compete for shared resources, leading to congestion and thereby reduced rewards. By appropriate coordination the members of the…