Related papers: When Smoothness is Not Enough: Toward Exact Quanti…
Game theory has emerged as a fruitful paradigm for the design of networked multiagent systems. A fundamental component of this approach is the design of agents' utility functions so that their self-interested maximization results in a…
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…
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…
The price of anarchy (PoA) is a popular metric for analyzing the inefficiency of self-interested decision making. Although its study is widespread, characterizing the PoA can be challenging. A commonly employed approach is based on the…
A central goal in algorithmic game theory is to analyze the performance of decentralized multiagent systems, like communication and information networks. In the absence of a central planner who can enforce how these systems are utilized,…
Congestion games are popular models often used to study the system-level inefficiencies caused by selfish agents, typically measured by the price of anarchy. One may expect that aligning the agents' preferences with the system-level…
In recent years, a significant research effort has been devoted to the design of distributed protocols for the control of multi-agent systems, as the scale and limited communication bandwidth characteristic of such systems render…
Organizations consist of individuals connected by their responsibilities, incentives, and reporting structure. These connections are aptly represented by a network, hierarchical or other, which is often used to divide tasks. A primary goal…
We study assignment games in which jobs select machines, and in which certain pairs of jobs may conflict, which is to say they may incur an additional cost when they are both assigned to the same machine, beyond that associated with the…
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 coordination mechanisms for Scheduling Games (with unrelated machines). In these games, each job represents a player, who needs to choose a machine for its execution, and intends to complete earliest possible. Our goal is to design…
Learning in games provides a powerful framework to design control policies for self-interested agents that may be coupled through their dynamics, costs, or constraints. We consider the case where the dynamics of the coupled system can be…
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…
We study the problem of achieving decentralized coordination by a group of strategic decision makers choosing to engage or not in a task in a stochastic setting. First, we define a class of symmetric utility games that encompass a broad…
This paper studies the finite-time horizon Markov games where the agents' dynamics are decoupled but the rewards can possibly be coupled across agents. The policy class is restricted to local policies where agents make decisions using their…
Synthesis of finite-state controllers from high-level specifications in multi-agent systems can be reduced to solving multi-player concurrent games over finite graphs. The complexity of solving such games with qualitative objectives for…
We consider the interaction among agents engaging in a driving task and we model it as general-sum game. This class of games exhibits a plurality of different equilibria posing the issue of equilibrium selection. While selecting the most…
In this paper we study the problem of allocating a scarce resource among several players (or agents). A central decision maker wants to maximize the total utility of all agents. However, such a solution may be unfair for one or more agents…
A number of prototypical optimization problems in multi-agent systems (e.g., task allocation and network load-sharing) exhibit a highly local structure: that is, each agent's decision variables are only directly coupled to few other agent's…
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…