Cost of Cooperation for Scheduling Meetings

Scheduling meetings among agents can be represented as a game the Meetings Scheduling Game (MSG). In its simplest form, the two-person MSG is shown to have a price of anarchy (PoA) which is bounded by 0.5. The paper defines the Cost of Cooperation (CoC) for meetings scheduling games, with respect to different global objective functions. For an “egalitarian” objective, that maximizes the minimal gain among all participating agents, the CoC is non positive for all agents. This makes the MSG a cooperation game. The concepts are defined and examples are given within the context of the MSG. A game may be revised by adding a mediator (or with a slight change of its mechanism) so that it behaves as a cooperation game. Thus, rational participants can cooperate (by taking part in a distributed optimization protocol) and receive a payoff which will be at least as high as the worst gain expected by a game theoretic equilibrium point.