On Agent Failures in Totally Balanced Cooperative Games

Add to your list(s) Download to your calendar using vCal

• Nisarg Shah, Microsoft Research
• Thursday 02 August 2012, 14:00-15:00
• Small lecture theatre, Microsoft Research Ltd, 7 J J Thomson Avenue (Off Madingley Road), Cambridge.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Microsoft Research Cambridge Talks Admins.

This event may be recorded and made available internally or externally via http://research.microsoft.com. Microsoft will own the copyright of any recordings made. If you do not wish to have your image/voice recorded please consider this before attending

Cooperative game theory is used to analyze how selfish agents, who must cooperate to achieve their goals, might work together and share the resulting gains. One prominent solution concept, known as the core, requires that no subset of agents should have any incentive to defect and work on its own. Existential and computational questions regarding the core are widely studied in the literature. However, most models assume that all the agents would always be able to fill their role and that there are no failures. This is hardly the case in reality. The recent model of the reliability extension formalizes the notion of independent agent failures in cooperative games.

In this talk, I will use this model to demonstrate the effect of such failures on the class of totally balanced games and the more specific subclass of convex games. Totally balanced games are games where the core is non-empty in every subgame. I will show that totally balanced games remain totally balanced even under failures. I will then present an algorithm to compute such a core solution. These results lead to some interesting discoveries regarding the effect of failures on existence of the core.

This talk is part of the Microsoft Research Cambridge, public talks series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• All Talks (aka the CURE list)
• Cambridge Centre for Data-Driven Discovery (C2D3)
• Cambridge talks
• Chris Davis' list
• Guy Emerson's list
• Interested Talks
• Microsoft Research Cambridge, public talks
• Optics for the Cloud
• PMRFPS's
• School of Technology
• Small lecture theatre, Microsoft Research Ltd, 7 J J Thomson Avenue (Off Madingley Road), Cambridge
• Trust & Technology Initiative - interesting events
• bld31
• ndk22's list
• ob366-ai4er
• personal list
• rp587

Note that ex-directory lists are not shown.