Stochastic game

About: Stochastic game is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 9493 publications have been published within this topic receiving 202664 citations.

Equilibrium Play in Large Group Market Entry Games

Abstract: Coordination behavior is studied experimentally in a class of noncooperative market entry games featuring symmetric players, complete information, zero entry costs, and several randomly presented values of the market capacity. Once the market capacity becomes publicly known, each player must decide privately whether to enter the market and receive a payoff, which increases linearly in the difference between the market capacity and the number of entrants, or stay out. Payoffs for staying out are either positive, giving rise to the domain of gains, or negative, giving rise to the domain of losses. The major findings are substantial individual differences that do not diminish with practice, aggregate behavior that is organized extremely well in both the domains of gains and losses by the Nash equilibrium solution, and variations in the population action strategies with repeated play of the stage game that are accounted for by a variant of an adaptive learning model due to Roth and Erev (1995).

A Decentralized Energy Management Framework for Energy Hubs in Dynamic Pricing Markets

Abstract: With increasing the presence of co- and tri-generating units, energy hub operators are encouraged to optimally schedule the available energy resources in an economic way. This scheduling needs to be run in an online manner due to the uncertainties in energy prices and demands. In this paper, the real-time scheduling problem of energy hubs is formulated in a dynamic pricing market. The energy hubs interaction is modeled as an exact potential game to optimize each energy hub’s payments to the electricity and gas utilities, as well as the customers’ satisfaction from energy consumption. The potential game approach enables us to study the existence and uniqueness of the Nash equilibrium and to design an online distributed algorithm to achieve that equilibrium. Simulations results show that the proposed algorithm can increase the energy hubs’ average payoff by 18.8%. Furthermore, energy service companies can improve the technical performance of energy networks by reducing the peak-to-average ratio in the electricity and natural gas by 27% and 7%, respectively. When compared with a centralized approach with the objective of social welfare, the proposed algorithm has a significantly lower running time at the cost of lower social welfare.

A General Class of Adaptive Strategies

Abstract: We exhibit and characterize an entire class of simple adaptive strategies, in the repeated play of a game, having the Hannan- consistency property: In the long-run, the player is guaranteed an average payoff as large as the best-reply payoff to the empirical distribution of play of the other players; i.e., there is no ``regret.'' Smooth fictitious play (Fudenberg and Levine [1995]) and regret-matching (Hart and Mas-Colell [2000]) are particular cases. The motivation and application of the current paper come from the study of procedures whose empirical distribution of play is, in the long-run, (almost) a correlated equilibrium. For the analysis we first develop a generalization of Blackwell's [1956a] approachability strategy for games with vector payoffs.

Decentralized Stochastic Control of Delay Tolerant Networks

Abstract: We study in this paper optimal stochastic control issues in delay tolerant networks. We first derive the structure of optimal 2-hop forwarding policies. In order to be implemented, such policies require the knowledge of some system parameters such as the number of mobiles or the rate of contacts between mobiles, but these could be unknown at system design time or may change over time. To address this problem, we design adaptive policies combining estimation and control that achieve optimal performance in spite of the lack of information. We then study interactions that may occur in the presence of several competing classes of mobiles and formulate this as a cost-coupled stochastic game. We show that this game has a unique Nash equilibrium such that each class adopts the optimal forwarding policy determined for the single class problem.