Selfish cops and active robber: Multi-player pursuit evasion on graphs

Abstract

We introduce and study the game of “Selfish Cops and Active Robber” (SCAR) which can be seen as a multiplayer variant of the “classic” two-player Cops and Robbers (CR) game. In classic CR all cops are controlled by a single player, who has no preference over which cop captures the robber. In SCAR, on the other hand, each of N−1 cops is controlled by a separate player, and a single robber is controlled by the N-th player; and the capturing cop player receives a higher reward than the non-capturing ones. Consequently, SCAR is an N-player pursuit game on graphs, in which each cop player has an increased motive to be the one who captures the robber. The focus of our study is the existence and properties of SCAR Nash Equilibria (NE). In particular, we prove that SCAR always has one NE in deterministic positional strategies and (for N≥3) another one in, generally, deterministic nonpositional strategies. Furthermore, we study conditions which, at equilibrium, guarantee either capture or escape of the robber and show that (because of the antagonism between the “selfish” cop players) the robber may, in certain SCAR configurations, be captured later than he would be in classic CR, or even not captured at all. Finally we define the selfish cop number of a graph and study its connection to the classic cop number.