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Agent incentives of a proportional sharing mechanism in resource sharing

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Abstract

In a resource sharing system, resources are shared among multiple interconnected peers. Peers act as both suppliers and customers of resources by making a certain amount of their resources directly available to other network participants. Their utilities are determined by the total of resources received from all neighbors. The allocation of the shared resources is determined by a preset mechanism that depends on the information submitted from the agents. The participating agents, however, may try to strategically manipulate its submitted information to improve its utility. In this paper, we consider a tit-for-tat popular proportional sharing mechanism and discuss the incentives an agent may lie, by a so-called vertex splitting strategy, for personal gains. We use the concept of incentive ratio to characterize the extent to which utilities can be increased. For the resource sharing system where the underlying network is a cycle, we prove that the incentive ratio is bounded by \(2\le \zeta \le 4\). Furthermore, the incentive ratio on a cycle with even number of vertices is proved to be exactly 2.

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Acknowledgements

This research was partially supported by the National Nature Science Foundation of China (Nos. 11301475, 11426026, 61632017, 61173011), by a Project 985 grant of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, and by the Research Grant Council of Hong Kong (ECS Project No. 26200314, GRF Project No. 16213115 and GRF Project No. 16243516).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Industrial Engineering and Decision Analytics, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Clear Water Bay, Hong Kong

    Zhou Chen & Qi Qi

  2. School of Business, Suzhou University of Science and Technology, Suzhou, 215009, China

    Yukun Cheng

  3. Department of Computer Science, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, No.800 Dongchuan Road, Shanghai, 200240, China

    Xiang Yan

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  1. Zhou Chen
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  2. Yukun Cheng
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  3. Qi Qi
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  4. Xiang Yan
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Yukun Cheng.

Additional information

A preliminary version of this paper appeared in the Proceedings of the 23rd Annual International Computing and Combinatorics Conference (COCOON), 2017.

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Cite this article

Chen, Z., Cheng, Y., Qi, Q. et al. Agent incentives of a proportional sharing mechanism in resource sharing. J Comb Optim 37, 639–667 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10878-018-0315-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10878-018-0315-5

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