Abstract
Cooperative game theory aims to study complex systems in which players have an interest to play together instead of selfishly in an interactive context. This interest may not always be true in an adversarial setting. We consider in this paper that several players have a choice to participate or not in a coalition in order to maximize their utility against an adversarial player. We observe that participating in a coalition is not always the best decision; indeed selfishness can lead to better individual utility. However, this is true under rare yet interesting scenarios. This result is quite surprising as in standard cooperative games; coalitions are formed if and only if it is profitable for players. We illustrate our results with two important resource-sharing problems: resource allocation in communication networks and visibility maximization in online social networks. We also discuss fair sharing using Shapley values, when cooperation is beneficial.
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Manuscript under preparation and the Technical report downloadable at http://www.ieor.iitb.ac.in/files/faculty/kavitha/ParticipateOrNot_TR.pdf
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Dhounchak, R., Kavitha, V., Hayel, Y. (2019). To Participate or Not in a Coalition in Adversarial Games. In: Walrand, J., Zhu, Q., Hayel, Y., Jimenez, T. (eds) Network Games, Control, and Optimization. Static & Dynamic Game Theory: Foundations & Applications. Birkhäuser, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10880-9_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-10880-9_8
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