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Structured coalitions in resource selection games

Published: 22 October 2010 Publication History

Abstract

We study stability against coalitional deviations in resource selection games where the coalitions have a certain structure. In particular, the agents are partitioned into coalitions, and only deviations by the prescribed coalitions are considered. This is in contrast to the classical concept of strong equilibrium according to which any subset of the agents may deviate. In resource selection games, each agent selects a resource from a set of resources, and its payoff is an increasing (or nondecreasing) function of the number of agents selecting its resource. While it has been shown that a strong equilibrium always exists in resource selection games, a closer look reveals severe limitations to the applicability of the existence result even in the simplest case of two identical resources with increasing cost functions. First, these games do not possess a super strong equilibrium in which a fruitful deviation benefits at least one deviator without hurting any other deviator. Second, a strong equilibrium may not exist when the game is played repeatedly. We prove that for any given partition, there exists a super strong equilibrium for resource selection games of identical resources with increasing cost functions. In addition, we show similar existence results for a variety of other classes of resource selection games. For the case of repeated games, we characterize partitions that guarantee the existence of a strong equilibrium. Together, our work introduces a natural concept, which turns out to lead to positive and applicable results in one of the basic domains studied in the literature.

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cover image ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology
ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology  Volume 1, Issue 1
October 2010
117 pages
ISSN:2157-6904
EISSN:2157-6912
DOI:10.1145/1858948
Issue’s Table of Contents
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 22 October 2010
Accepted: 01 June 2010
Revised: 01 May 2010
Received: 01 March 2010
Published in TIST Volume 1, Issue 1

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Author Tags

  1. Coalitions
  2. partition
  3. repeated games
  4. resource selection games
  5. strong equilibrium

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  • (2020)On Existence of Equilibrium Under Social Coalition StructuresTheory and Applications of Models of Computation10.1007/978-3-030-59267-7_23(263-274)Online publication date: 18-Oct-2020
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