The Impact of Stability, Fairness, and Other Desirable Properties in Multi-Agent Systems

A special issue of Games (ISSN 2073-4336). This special issue belongs to the section "Algorithmic and Computational Game Theory".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 July 2021) | Viewed by 2646

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
Gran Sasso Science Institute, Viale Francesco Crispi 7, 67100 L’Aquila, Italy
Interests: algorithms and computational complexity; algorithmic game theory; computational social choice; artificial intelligence; optimization problems in distributed systems and complex networks

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Co-Guest Editor
Gran Sasso Science Institute, Viale Francesco Crispi 7, 67100 L’Aquila, Italy
Interests: algorithmic game theory; mechanism design; algorithms

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Co-Guest Editor
Gran Sasso Science Institute, Viale Francesco Crispi 7, 67100 L’Aquila, Italy
Interests: algorithmic game theory; approximation and online algorithms; combinatorial optimization; computational complexity

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

In the last two decades, multi-agent systems have been widely investigated in artificial intelligence and algorithmics, due to strongly emerging real-life scenarios characterized by decentralization, autonomy and general lack of coordination. A large number of agents in our digital world and society exhibit various degrees of intentional or unintentional non-cooperative behaviour, while competing for shared and often scarce resources. In such a highly elusive and mutable setting, where scalability and efficiency are an issue, a suitable compromise needs to be reached among several desirable properties, such as good social welfare, stability, fairness, etc. In this respect, the general mismatch between the global optimization goals and agents’ preferences and private interests, the lack of coordination, and the pressing need for scalability and good performance all call for new research directions and solutions, resorting to tools and insights coming from the integration of algorithmic ideas with techniques borrowed from game theory and computational social choice. 

Original contributions in the above frame of reference are welcome, with special concern to the following challenges:

  • If a given multi-agents system reaches a stable/equilibrium configuration, how suboptimal can the resulting performance be?
  • Is it possible to be fair toward all the agents (e.g., when assigning goods and resources), without overly affecting other desirable properties (e.g., social welfare)?
  • Can a central authority rule systems or intervene in order to encourage a cooperative behaviour of the agents and lead them, at least partially, toward better outcomes/choices?

We would welcome contributions including, but not limited to, the following settings: fair allocation, markets, coalition and team formation, matching problems, network and congestion games, voting, social influence maximization.

Prof. Dr. Michele Flammini
Guest Editor
Dr. Bojana Kodric
Dr. Cosimo Vinci
Co-Guest Editors

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Keywords

  • Multi-agent systems 
  • Equilibria 
  • Mechanism Design 
  • Social Welfare 
  • Price of Anarchy 
  • Price of Stability 
  • Fairness

Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

14 pages, 302 KiB  
Article
Additively Separable Hedonic Games with Social Context
by Gianpiero Monaco, Luca Moscardelli and Yllka Velaj
Games 2021, 12(3), 71; https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.3390/g12030071 - 18 Sep 2021
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Abstract
In hedonic games, coalitions are created as a result of the strategic interaction of independent players. In particular, in additively separable hedonic games, every player has valuations for all other ones, and the utility for belonging to a coalition is given by the [...] Read more.
In hedonic games, coalitions are created as a result of the strategic interaction of independent players. In particular, in additively separable hedonic games, every player has valuations for all other ones, and the utility for belonging to a coalition is given by the sum of the valuations for all other players belonging to it. So far, non-cooperative hedonic games have been considered in the literature only with respect to totally selfish players. Starting from the fundamental class of additively separable hedonic games, we define and study a new model in which, given a social graph, players also care about the happiness of their friends: we call this class of games social context additively separable hedonic games (SCASHGs). We focus on the fundamental stability notion of Nash equilibrium, and study the existence, convergence and performance of stable outcomes (with respect to the classical notions of price of anarchy and price of stability) in SCASHGs. In particular, we show that SCASHGs are potential games, and therefore Nash equilibria always exist and can be reached after a sequence of Nash moves of the players. Finally, we provide tight or asymptotically tight bounds on the price of anarchy and the price of stability of SCASHGs. Full article
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