TY - GEN
T1 - Efficient equilibria in a public goods game
AU - Komarovsky, Zohar
AU - Levit, Vadim
AU - Grinshpoun, Tal
AU - Meisels, Amnon
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2015 IEEE.
PY - 2016/2/2
Y1 - 2016/2/2
N2 - The "best-shot" public goods game is a network game, defined on a social network. As in most strategic games, it contains a structured tradeoff between stability and efficiency. The present study considers a multi-agent system, in which each agent represents a player in the "best-shot" game. It is demonstrated that any Pure-strategy Nash Equilibrium (PNE) of the "best-shot" game is Pareto efficient and that best-response dynamics converge into a PNE within a linear number of steps. It is also shown that the game is a potential game. The potential function can be utilized for the search of PNEs with certain social properties. In order to improve efficiency beyond the limited set of stable states, a mechanism of side payments is proposed. We prove that by using side payments an outcome that maximizes social welfare can be stabilized. A distributed protocol based on asymmetric distributed constraints optimization, which enables the search for efficient outcomes, is proposed. Finally, an extensive experimental evaluation compares the actual social welfare in outcomes achieved by different search paradigms for common social networks structures.
AB - The "best-shot" public goods game is a network game, defined on a social network. As in most strategic games, it contains a structured tradeoff between stability and efficiency. The present study considers a multi-agent system, in which each agent represents a player in the "best-shot" game. It is demonstrated that any Pure-strategy Nash Equilibrium (PNE) of the "best-shot" game is Pareto efficient and that best-response dynamics converge into a PNE within a linear number of steps. It is also shown that the game is a potential game. The potential function can be utilized for the search of PNEs with certain social properties. In order to improve efficiency beyond the limited set of stable states, a mechanism of side payments is proposed. We prove that by using side payments an outcome that maximizes social welfare can be stabilized. A distributed protocol based on asymmetric distributed constraints optimization, which enables the search for efficient outcomes, is proposed. Finally, an extensive experimental evaluation compares the actual social welfare in outcomes achieved by different search paradigms for common social networks structures.
KW - ADCOP
KW - Efficient equilibria
KW - Public goods games
KW - Side payments
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85028317998&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/WI-IAT.2015.91
DO - 10.1109/WI-IAT.2015.91
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AN - SCOPUS:85028317998
T3 - Proceedings - 2015 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Joint Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology, WI-IAT 2015
SP - 214
EP - 219
BT - Proceedings - 2015 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Joint Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology, WI-IAT 2015
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
T2 - 2015 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Joint Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology Workshops, WI-IAT Workshops 2015
Y2 - 6 December 2015 through 9 December 2015
ER -