Popularity in location games

We study two-firm location games on graphs. Earlier work analyzes twofirm location games on a line or a circle, and all examples given possess pure Nash equilibria. We produce an example of a graph with no pure Nash equilibria and also a general class of graphs that do possess pure Nash equilibria. CONSIDER a small region with a population distributed uniformly along a network of roads. Two competing firms locate in the region. Each inhabitant of the region is a consumer who patronizes the firm nearest his home, where the distance from consumer to firm is the length of the shortest drive betwen them. There may be stretches of road along which each consumer is equidistant from the two firms. Such a stretch is divided into two stretches of equal length, and one of these is assigned to each firm. A firm's payoff is the sum of the lengths of the stretches of road lined by its patrons. The above is an example of a two-firm location game (Hotelling [1929]) on a graph. We are interested in finding pure Nash equilibria for such a game. The original statement of the two firm location game was Hotelling's model of two firms that locate on a line segment on which customers are uniformly distributed. The unique Nash equilibrium is paired location in the center. This result has been dubbed the Principle of Minimum Differentiation, and the Principle has been used to explain spatial (location) and nonspatial (for example, product characteristics) similarities between firms and the products they produce. Researchers have generalized the original statement of the location game by altering the basic assumptions of Hotelling's model. The problem has been investigated (for two or more firms, pure and mixed strategies) in the special cases where the graph is a line interval or circle (Eaton and Lipsey [1975], Shaked [1982]). There have also been studies involving geometric objects other than finite graphs (Dasgupta and Maskin [1986] and Simon [1987]). These various location games possess a variety of configurations of Nash equilibrium. For example, in the case of a two firm game on a circle, every strategy pair is a Nash equilibrium. Hence, the well ingrained Principle of Minimum Differentiation need not hold when variations are made in the original statement of the problem.

Locative gaming dates back to the early 2000s, and with the success of Ingress (2012) and Pokemon GO (2016), locative games have now entered the mainstream in a very serious way. However, while the genre holds considerable promise for cultural heritage, it has yet to make a real impact for this purpose. A particular challenge is to reconcile the two apparently conflicting concerns of ensuring immersion into the experience without compromising the audience's sense of presence in the physical space. For example, Ingress and Pokemon GO offer excellent immersion in the gameplay but at the cost of near-total loss of the player's sense of presence in the physical environment, even to the extent that accidents occur. For cultural heritage, presence is not only about safety, but also about the audience experiencing the site and not only the digital content. In this paper, we argue that for locative games to be successful for cultural heritage, they must bridge the design tension between offering immersion and presence. We use two of our own titles to shed light on the design concerns and show how careful use of locative game mechanics and narrative techniques can help reconcile these two design pressures and create a new type of engagement with cultural heritage.

We provide geometric versions of finite, two-person games in the course of proving the following: if a finite, two-person, symmetric game is constant-sum, it is a location game. If it is not constant-sum, it is a location game with a reservation price. Every finite two-person game is a location game with a reservation price and two location sets, one for each player.

Locative gaming dates back to the early 2000s, and with the success of Ingress (2012) and Pokemon GO (2016), locative games have now entered the mainstream in a very serious way. However, while the genre holds considerable promise for cultural heritage, it has yet to make a real impact for this purpose. A particular challenge is to reconcile the two apparently conflicting concerns of ensuring immersion into the experience without compromising the audience's sense of presence in the physical space. For example, Ingress and Pokemon GO offer excellent immersion in the gameplay but at the cost of near-total loss of the player's sense of presence in the physical environment, even to the extent that accidents occur. For cultural heritage, presence is not only about safety, but also about the audience experiencing the site and not only the digital content. In this paper, we argue that for locative games to be successful for cultural heritage, they must bridge the design tension between offering immersion and presence. We use two of our own titles to shed light on the design concerns and show how careful use of locative game mechanics and narrative techniques can help reconcile these two design pressures and create a new type of engagement with cultural heritage.

PartI: Social Networks.- A Simple Model of Fads and Cascading Failures on Sparse Switching Networks.- Self Organised Criticality in Economic and Social Networks - The Case of Innovation Diffusion.- Social Percolators and Self Organized Criticality.- Lock-out in Social Networks.- Cooperation, Adaptation and the Emergence of Leadership.- PartII: From micro to macro behaviours.- Technology Diffusion, Stability and Decay: Some Results.- On Dynamic Re-Specifications of Kiyotaki-Wright Model.- Industrial Dynamics with Quasi-Zero Intelligence Interacting Firms.- PartIII: Finance.- Stability of Pareto-Zipf Law in Non-stationary Economies.- Toy Models of Markets with Heterogeneous Interacting Agents.- Price Bubbles and the Long Run Profitability of a Trend Following Technical Trading Rule.- Firms' Financial Heterogeneity and Business Cycles.- PartIV: Coalitions.- Stable Coalition Structures with Fixed Decision Scheme.- Coalition Formation with Heterogeneous Agents.- Location Games with Externalities.- V: Interactions and Knowledge.- Simon says... What ? - Rationality of Imitation in a Simonian Perspective.- Interacting Individuals and Organizations: a Case Study on Cooperations Between Firms and Research Laboratories.- Organisational Innovation, Communities of Practice and Epistemic Communities: the Case of Linux.- Knowledge Creation, Knowledge Diffusion and Network Structure.

Mechanisms for dual-role-facility location games: Truthfulness and approximability

Artists' Locative Games

Tight efficiency lower bounds for strategy-proof mechanisms in two-opposite-facility location game

Concerns have been expressed that in a global market place with mobile capital, national governments have incentives to set weak environmental policies and that these incentives are particularly strong in industries where plants are footloose. In an earlier paper we used a simple model of imperfect competition to compare the environmental policies (in this case, emission standards) that would be set by non-cooperative governments for two different move structures. The first is where governments cannot commit and so set environmental policies after firms decide where to locate (Market Share Game). The second is where governments can commit to environmental policies before firms decide where to locate (Location Game). We showed that the extent of environmental dumping in the Market Share Game could be greater than in the Location Game. However, in that earlier paper we followed much of the literature on multi-stage games in assuming that if the government can commit then it commits to the same environmental standard no matter what the subsequent location decisions of firms turn out to be (we call this simple commitment). But in principle a government could commit to a policy rule, which specifies which environmental standard it will set depending on the number of firms that choose to locate (we call this full commitment). In this paper we extend our earlier paper by comparing the extent of environmental dumping and welfare not only between the cases of no commitment but also between the two forms of commitment. We show that while environmental dumping may or may not be greater with full commitment than with simple commitment, expected welfare of governments is higher with full commitment than simple commitment.KeywordsNash EquilibriumEnvironmental PolicyDamage CostMarginal Abatement CostEmission LimitThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Farsighted stable sets in Hotelling’s location games

Continuous Strategy Games as Location Games

This paper shows how spatialised sound can be used to guide users around a located gaming environment. Thus far, despite growing interest in delivering location-relevant media information to users, accurate delivery of virtual spatialised sound using limited-processing portable devices, such as Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), has not yet been explored. The use of spatialised sound allows users to judge accurately which direction a virtual sound is coming from through a pair of stereo headphones. The initial findings of this research demonstrates that spatialised sound can be used to navigate users in a locative game running on a PDA.

We study the existence and determination of Nash equilibria (NE) in location games where firms compete for the market with the aim of profit maximization. Each competing firm locates one facility at one point on a network and customers, which are located at the nodes of the network, distribute their buying power between the firms from which they get a minimum price. Two cases are considered depending on price policy: mill pricing and delivered pricing. In the former, the existence of NE depends on the structure of the network and the distribution of demand among its nodes. We give some conditions for the existence of NE, taking into account whether co-location is permitted and whether locations are restricted to nodes. Regarding delivered pricing policy, NE always exist at the nodes if production cost along any edge of the network is concave. A mixed integer linear programming formulation is proposed to find them.

Mobile locative games consist of a subset of mobile games that encourage players to go outside, by promoting outdoor activities and physical meetings. Because of this, their gameplay breaks the core of social distancing strategies implemented since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, developers implemented changes in their locative games supported by the mobile game revenue model, which enabled a strategy called “playing remotely” that encourages the players to spend their money with microtransactions. This study analyses the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic in mobile locative gaming, by examining the preferences and behavior of players from the Northeast Brazil, a region with socioeconomic inequalities and urban violence, among other issues that shape mobility practices.Accordingly, we pose a research question: how do players living in Northeast Brazil manage the mobile game revenue model for playing remotely during the COVID-19 pandemic? With this in mind, we have conducted an online survey among communities of players located in Northeast Brazil, by sharing a questionnaire with 21 questions. Seventy-four players from the region responded to our survey. The sample's age was from 16 to 58 years old, and they lived in seven of the nine states that form Northeast Brazil. We have found that players’ preference is to invest their time in gathering resources by playing the game, instead of spending their money in microtransactions for playing remotely. Moreover, we have found that mobile communication plays a significant role in keeping players in touch during the COVID-19 pandemic, allowing players to expand their networks to other cities and countries. We have concluded that playing remotely represents an important strategy to support the development of locative games and other location-based applications, which can help us to prepare for the next pandemic.

In this paper, we focus on the facility location games with the property of dual preference. Dual preference property indicates that both two preferences of agents, staying close to and staying away from the facility(s), exist in the facility location game. We will explore two types of facility location games with this property, the dual character facility location game and the two-opposite-facility location game with limited distance which model the scenarios in real life. For both of them, we wish to design strategy proof mechanisms or group strategy-proof mechanisms with the objective of optimizing the social utility. For the dual character facility location game, we propose a strategy proof optimal mechanism when misreporting is restricted to agents' preferences, and give a 1/3-approximation deterministic group strategy-proof mechanism when both location and preference are considered as private information. For the two-opposite-facility location game with limited distance, when the number of agents is even (denoted as 2k), we give a 1/k-approximation deterministic group strategy-proof mechanism, and when the number of agents is odd (denoted as 2k-1), we propose a 1/(2k-1)-approximation deterministic group strategy-proof mechanism. The approximation ratios for both mechanisms are proved to be the best a deterministic strategy-proof mechanism can achieve.