Smoothing techniques for computing Nash equilibria of sequential games

We develop first-order smoothing techniques for saddle-point problems that arise in the Nash equilibria computation of sequential games. The crux of our work is a construction of suitable prox-functions for a certain class of polytopes that encode the sequential nature of the games. An implementation based on our smoothing techniques computes approximate Nash equilibria for … Read more

Linear Programming for Mechanism Design: An Application to Bidder Collusion at First-Price Auctions

We demonstrate the use of linear programming techniques in the analysis of mechanism design problems. We use these techniques to analyze the extent to which a first-price auction is robust to collusion when, contrary to some prior literature on collusion at first-price auctions, the cartel cannot prevent its members from bidding at the auction. In … Read more

Formulation of Oligopolistic Competition in AC Power Networks: An NLP Approach

In this paper, oligopolistic competition in a centralized power market is characterized by a multi-leader single-follower game, and formulated as a nonlinear programming (NLP) problem. An AC network is used to represent the transmission system and is modeled using rectangular coordinates. The follower is composed of a set of competitive suppliers, demands, and the system … Read more

Numerical Study of Affine Supply Function Equilibrium in AC Network-Constrained Markets

An affine supply function equilibrium (SFE) approach is used to discuss voltage constraints and reactive power issues in the modeling of strategic behavior. Generation companies (GenCos) can choose their bid parameters with no restrictions for both energy and spinning reserves. The strategic behavior of generators is formulated as a multi-leader single-follower game. Each GenCo is … Read more

On the solution of fuzzy bilevel programming problems

In this paper we formulate the fuzzy bilevel programming problem and describe one possible approach for formulating a crisp optimization problem being attached to it. Due to the nature of fuzzy bilevel programming this is a crisp bilevel programming problem. We compare our approach with one using multicriterial optimization and show, that both approaches are … Read more

Sharing Supermodular Costs

We study cooperative games with supermodular costs. We show that supermodular costs arise in a variety of situations: in particular, we show that the problem of minimizing a linear function over a supermodular polyhedron–a problem that often arises in combinatorial optimization–has supermodular optimal costs. In addition, we examine the computational complexity of the least core … Read more

A gradient-based approach for computing Nash equilibria of large sequential games

We propose a new gradient based scheme to approximate Nash equilibria of large sequential two-player, zero-sum games. The algorithm uses modern smoothing techniques for saddle-point problems tailored specifically for the polytopes used in the Nash equilibrium problem. Citation Working Paper, Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University Article Download View A gradient-based approach for computing … Read more

The Impact of Collusion on the Price of Anarchy in Nonatomic and Discrete Network Games

Hayrapetyan, Tardos and Wexler recently introduced a framework to study the impact of collusion in congestion games on the quality of Nash equilibria. We adopt their framework to network games and focus on the well established price of anarchy as a measure of this impact. We first investigate nonatomic network games with coalitions. For this … Read more

Decentralized Decision-making and Protocol Design for Recycled Material Flows

Reverse logistics networks often consist of several tiers with independent members competing at each tier. This paper develops a methodology to examine the individual entity behavior in reverse production systems where every entity acts to maximize its own benefits. We consider two tiers in the network, collectors and processors. The collectors determine individual flow functions … Read more

Fast computation of the leastcore and prenucleolus of cooperative games

The computation of leastcore and prenucleolus is an efficient way of allocating a common resource among N players. It has, however, the drawback being a linear programming problem with 2^N-2 constraints. In this paper we show how, in the case of convex production games, generate constraints by solving small size linear programming problems, with both … Read more