Chinese Restaurant Game

Abstract

In this letter, by introducing the strategic decision making into the Chinese restaurant process, we propose a new game, called Chinese Restaurant Game, as a new general framework for analyzing the individual decision problem in a network with negative network externality. Our analysis shows that a balance in utilities among the customers in the game will eventually be achieved under the strategic decision making process. The equilibrium grouping is defined to describe the predicted outcome of the proposed game, which can be found by a simple algorithm. The simulation results confirm that the rational customers in Chinese restaurant game automatically achieve a balance in loading in order to reduce the impact from the negative network externality.