Individual resource games and resource redistributions

Abstract

Abstract To introduce agent-based technologies in real-world systems, one needs to acknowledge that the agents often have limited access to resources. They have to seek after resource objectives and compete for those resources. We introduce a class of resource games where resources and preferences are specified with the language of a resource-sensitive logic. The agents are endowed with a bag of resources and try to achieve a resource objective. For each agent, an action consists in making available a part of their endowed resources. All the resources made available can be used towards the agents’ objectives. We study three decision problems, the first of which is deciding whether an action profile is a Nash equilibrium: when all the agents have chosen an action, it is a Nash Equilibrium if no agent has an incentive to change their action unilaterally. When dealing with resources, interesting questions arise as to whether some equilibria can be eliminated or constructed by a central authority by redistributing the available resources among the agents. In our economies, division of property in divorce law exemplifies how a central authority can redistribute the resources of individuals and why they would desire to do so. We thus study two related decision problems: (i) rational elimination: given an action profile’s outcome, can the endowed resources be redistributed so that it is not the outcome of a Nash equilibrium? (ii) Rational construction: given an action profile’s outcome, can the endowed resources be redistributed so that it is the outcome of a Nash equilibrium? Among other results, we prove that all three problems are $\mathsf{PSPACE}$-complete when the resources are described in the very expressive language of the propositional multiplicative and additive linear logic. We also identify a new modest fragment of linear logic that we call MULT, suitable to represent multisets and reason about the inclusion and equality of bags of resources. We show that when the resources are described in MULT, the problem of deciding whether a profile is a Nash equilibrium is in $\textsf{PTIME}$.