We study the inefficiency of equilibria for several classes of games when players are (partially) altruistic. We model altruistic behavior by assuming that player i’s perceived cost is a convex combination of 1−αi times his direct cost and αi times the social cost. Tuning the parameters αi allows smooth interpolation between purely selfish and purely altruistic behavior. Within this framework, ...

We consider charging problems, where the goal is to coordinate the charge of a fleet of electric vehicles by means of a distributed algorithm. Several works have recently modelled the problem as a game, and thus proposed algorithms to coordinate the vehicles towards a Nash equilibrium. However, Nash equilibria have been shown to posses desirable system-level properties only in simplified cases,...

We consider the solution concept of stochastic stability, and propose the price of stochastic anarchy as an alternative to the price of (Nash) anarchy for quantifying the cost of selfishness and lack of coordination in games. As a solution concept, the Nash equilibrium has disadvantages that the set of stochastically stable states of a game avoid: unlike Nash equilibria, stochastically stable s...

I will review two concepts in this project. These two concept are: the price of anarchy and the price of malice. The price of anarchy is the ratio between, the worst Nash equilibrium possible in a game, and the optimal solution achieved when all agents collaborate. So it is comparing the Nash equilibrium which gives the worst social welfare to the solution that gives the best social welfare. Th...

With his 1979 article "Do we really ever get out of anarchy?" Alfred Cuzán provides us with a wonderful insight: "Anarchy, like matter, never disappears it only changes form." Cuzán argues that anarchy, defined as the absence of a third party territorial monopolist of ultimate jurisdiction, is omnipresent: Regardless of what political system we live under, there will always be anarchic relation...

2. The k inequalities that bound individuals’ equilibrium costs are summed over the players. The left-hand side of the resulting inequality is the cost of the PNE s; the right-hand side is a strange entangled function of s and s∗ (involving terms of the form fef ∗ e ). 3. The hardest step is to relate the entangled term ∑k i=1Ci(si ∗, s−i) generated by the previous step to the only two quantiti...

We study influence maximization problems over social networks, in the presence of competition. Our focus is on diffusion processes within the family of threshold models. Motivated by the general lack of positive results establishing monotonicity and submodularity of the influence function for threshold models, we introduce a general class of switching-selection threshold models where the switch...