Non-cooperative Strategies Research Articles

Durability of decisions explained by actor-strategies in games: A multiple case study analysis

Public decision-making contains several decisions taken by multiple actors intended to lead to collective gains. The impact of these decisions varies over time. This paper presents a novel approach to explain the durability, i.e., impact, of decisions in relation to strategies performed by actors involved in infrastructure development projects. The concept of durability is operationalised in terms of actors fulfilling joint aims and creating joint focus. We aim to explain why some decisions have a durable (lasting and joint focus) impact and why other decisions have a non-durable (temporary and no joint focus) impact. Actor-strategies performed in the decision-making process are used to explain the different types of decision impact. After analysing several Dutch Railway projects, we discovered that durable decisions appear when (i) obstructive non-deciding and non-cooperative strategies are dealt with, (ii) responsibilities are clearly divided, (iii) the scope alternates between internal and external focus and coupling of issues happens, and (iv) the design of the decision-making process is made explicit and information asymmetry is managed.

A dynamic game approach for optimal consumption, investment and life insurance problem

AbstractIn this paper, we consider a multi-agent portfolio optimization model with life insurance for two players with random lifetime under a dynamic game approach. Each player is a price-taker and invests in the market to maximize her own utility for consumption and bequest. The market is complete and consists of n different assets, of which $$n-1$$ n - 1 are risky with prices driven by Geometric Brownian motion, while one is risk-free. We analyze both the non-cooperative and cooperative scenarios, and by considering the family of CRRA utility functions, we determine the closed-form expressions of the optimal consumption, investment, and life insurance for both players. A sensitivity analysis is provided both to illustrate the impact of the biometric and risk aversion parameters on the optimal controls and to compare the non-cooperative strategies with the cooperative ones. As a result, we suggest that cooperation favors the consumption optimality, while non-cooperation promotes the coverage of the risk of death.

Clustered bids in first-price auctions: Collusion or competition?

Clustering of the two most competitive bids in first-price auctions can be indicative of collusive behavior. However, it can also reflect non-cooperative strategies under complete information. I propose a simple procedure to distinguish between the two observationally equivalent explanations. This method requires the knowledge of winning bids and the determinants of the bid of the second most competitive bidder.

African power pools and regional electricity market design: Taking stock of regional integration in energy sectors

While the traditional perspective on regional power pools is that of regional electricity markets, regional power pools in Africa are development tools with unrepresentative and under-researched dynamics in their evolution and market design. Five African power pools are under development to bring the continent into a single electricity market. This paper analyses the evolution of African power pools by examining their design factors and dynamics. It compares the three most advanced power pools (SAPP, WAPP and EAPP) to identify barriers, forces, and development approaches. The paper devises a multilayer analytical framework to organise the various elements in the institutional context of African power pools and structure the analysis of the physical, economic, institutional and political factors. The analysis shows that the unequal distribution of natural energy endowments across the regions stimulated the historical development of interconnections and trade between countries. The characteristics of regional integration were vital in shaping the power pool’s institutions and development approaches. We have identified three motors of change that have driven the development; regional economic communities, members’ strategies, and international institutions. It is crucial for progress that the pool staff can mitigate non-cooperative strategies, address members’ concerns, and incentivise a shift in national agendas to build confidence in regional trade.

Effects of mixed policies on the cooperative and noncooperative strategies of auto manufacturers and charging infrastructure operators considering consumer preferences

ABSTRACT The dual-credit policy for auto manufacturers and the subsidy policy for charging infrastructure operators have become important policies to guide and promote the development of the automotive industry. However, few studies consider the impact of mixed policies on the market strategies of auto manufacturers and charging infrastructure operators considering consumer green preferences. To fill the gap, this article establishes optimization models to analyze and compare the effects of mixed policies on the decision-making of auto manufacturers and charging infrastructure operators under the cooperative and noncooperative modes considering consumer preference. The results reveal four main insights: (1) Two types of policies all have direct positive effects on the market diffusion of electric vehicles. Under the noncooperative mode, the dual-credit policy has no spillover effect. Under cooperative mode, two types of policies all have spillover effects. The dual-credit policy and charging infrastructure subsidy policy have positive superposition effects on the optimal number of charging piles, and the optimal demands for electric vehicles. (2) When the credit price is less than a certain threshold, there is a substitutive effect between the charging infrastructure subsidy policy and the dual-credit policy on promoting the market diffusion of electric vehicles. (3) There is a substitutive effect between high-level consumers’ green preference and policies on promoting the market diffusion of electric vehicles. (4) Under the cooperative mode, the direct and spillover effects of policies are more than that are under the noncooperative mode. These insights demonstrate the effectiveness and limitations of policies and the importance of providing complementary policies for consumers. The government should encourage market cooperation between auto manufacturers and charging infrastructure operators, maintain a stable price level for credits, and introduce incentive policies for green consumption.

Cooperative and noncooperative R&D in duopoly manufacturers with a common supplier

<p style='text-indent:20px;'>We consider the R&D strategy of firms under competitive environments from the supply chain perspective. Specifically, we investigate a supply chain consisting of one upstream component supplier and two downstream manufacturers, who however are the Stackelberg leader(s). At the early stage (<i>R</i>&<i>D</i> <i>stage</i>), the two manufacturers decide on whether to cooperate or not in the R&D activities and how much to invest in R&D accordingly. At the late stage (<i>market stage</i>), the component supplier decides on the uniform wholesale price and the manufacturers decide on the production quantities. Our main findings include: (ⅰ) Cooperative R&D strategy will be adopted when the technology spillover effect is either too large or too small and in contrast non-cooperative strategy will be accepted when the spillover effect is moderate. However, the underlying driving forces for coordination are different when the spillover effect is small or large, i.e., <i>cost reduction effect</i> and <i>sales increasing effect</i>. (ⅱ) Cooperative R&D could increase the social welfare when both the technology spillover effect and the (initial) unit production cost are high. (ⅲ) As the equilibrium under the cooperative R&D strategy is unstable, we give a coordination mechanism, to guarantee the stability of cooperative R&D investments.</p>

Strategies for Talent’s Digital Competence Development at Higher Vocational Colleges for Digital Transformation

Digital transformation has brought unprecedented opportunities and challenges to economic and social development, and the development of talent’s digital competence is of growing importance. Under an ideal situation, digitization, digitalization and digital transformation are three stages of gradual digital development. However, influenced by the difference in social and economic development among regions, higher vocational colleges, as an educational system closest to the labor market, vary by their own strengths and digital competence. From the perspective of game theory and based on the model of the boxed pig game, this paper provides strategies and suggestions for the cultivation of talent’s digital competence in terms of non-cooperative strategy at higher vocational colleges. The supply-demand model of talent’s digital competence cultivation is established to provide further suggestions for the top-down cooperation strategy among higher vocational colleges.

Pooling problems under perfect and imperfect competition

We investigate pooling problems in which multiple players vie with one another to maximize individual profit in a non-cooperative competitive market. This competitive setting is interesting and worthy of study because the majority of prevailing process systems engineering models largely overlook the non-cooperative strategies that exist in real-world markets. In this work, each player controls a processing network involving intermediate tanks (or pools) where raw materials are blended together before being further combined into final products. Each player then solves a pure or mixed-integer bilinear optimization problem whose profit is influenced by other players. We present several bilevel formulations and numerical results of a novel decomposition algorithm.

Secure distributed estimation under Byzantine attack and manipulation attack

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) with distributed cooperation has been widely used in various fields due to their strong adaptive learning ability. However, WSN is vulnerable to malicious attacks, and the damaging behaviors of these attacks would make sensor nodes work unsatisfactorily and then contaminate the entire network. Although some security algorithms have been proposed to detect these malicious attacks, such as manipulation attack and Byzantine attack, they are not robust enough. To ameliorate this situation, a secure distributed diffusion least-mean-square (LMS) algorithm is designed, which adopts the dual detection mechanisms over the designed two subsystems. One subsystem is based on the LMS with cooperative strategy (L-CS), which uses an angle detector to filter manipulation attack, while the other subsystem is based on the LMS with non-cooperative strategy (L-NCS), where the sensors utilize non-cooperation to improve the detection effect on Byzantine attack. Moreover, the L-CS subsystem could further provide the secure estimation for the proposed algorithm by isolating malicious nodes. The performances are analyzed from the mean and mean-square convergence. Finally, some simulations are implemented to prove the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

Provocation as a Tool of Language Influence

The article aims to study provocation as a particular type of interpersonal communication and a provocateur’s action who intends to obtain (provoke) necessary verbal reaction from the recipient by employing language influence. The provocateur is considered an active speaker whose main task is to plan the communicative process, choose appropriate strategies and tactics, and verbal and nonverbal markers of their realisation to implement effective communication. Provocation can be realised in terms of both communicative conflict and cooperation. Conflict situations involve communicative disharmony, pressure on the recipient, provocateur’s dominance, violating cooperative principles and maxims of communication and politeness principles, and non-cooperative strategies. In contrast, cooperative situations can be regarded as those where communicative balance is maintained, cooperative and politeness principles are followed, and cooperative strategies are applied. Provocation can be effective in both cooperative and non-cooperative implementation

Análisis del conflicto del agua: la disputa del río Nilo

La cuenca del río Nilo es la fuente de vida de Egipto, Etiopía, Sudán y los países río arriba, principalmente como agua para la agricultura y la energía hidroeléctrica. El recurso es el centro de un desarrollo muy disputado entre los países río abajo y río arriba. En los últimos años, debido en gran parte al cambio climático y al rápido crecimiento de la población, se ha producido un aumento en el nivel del conflicto relacionado con la escasez de agua y el subsecuente agravamiento de la inseguridad alimentaria. Además, las masas de agua transfronterizas tienen una gestión hídrica aún más compleja, convirtiéndose en uno de los principales temas geopolíticos de la actualidad. Este conflicto es el resultado de la ambición de los principales países ribereños, en particular Egipto, Sudán, Etiopía y otras naciones río arriba, por reclamar una mayor parte de los suministros de agua disponibles en la cuenca. Precisamente por eso, una teoría del juego cooperativo proporciona información valiosa sobre las disputas estratégicas en relación con los recursos hídricos. En este artículo, se evalúan las estrategias no cooperativas para determinar los posibles resultados de la disputa.

The Design of Urban Sculpture Space with User Behavior Based on Internet of Things and Edge Computing

To solve the application of Virtual Reality (VR) technology in the design of urban sculpture space, a VR network model is implemented based on Internet of Things (IoT) and Edge Computing. First, this work expounds and analyzes the theory of urban sculpture space and the interaction of urban sculpture space. Second, aiming at the problem that the development of IoT cannot meet the large amount of data and low delay of VR, a resource allocation algorithm, Joint Optimization of Resource Allocation and FOV (J-RAF) strategy is proposed based on the user interest and the resource allocation problem of (FOV), and simulation experiments are used to verify the effectiveness of the J-RAF algorithm. Finally, a VR network system is established based on cache cooperation and user interest, and a resource allocation algorithm Joint Cooperative Content Caching and FOV (J-CCF) is proposed, and its effectiveness is verified. Experiments show that compared with random strategy and random viewport strategy, algorithm J-CCF has 3% and 20% system gain. Compared with noncooperative cache scheme and random viewport strategy, algorithm J-CCF can improve the system gain by 15% and 25%, respectively. It is verified that the convergence of J-RAF algorithm and J-CCF algorithm and the effectiveness of improving the system gain. This work provides a technical basis for optimizing the design method of urban sculpture and contributes to the optimal design of urban space.

The role of governmental policy in game between traditional fuel and new energy vehicles

New energy vehicle (NEV) effectively contributes to the sustainable direction of the automobile industry, and it has been raised to the national strategic level. Our study establishes a quantitative model on the competition between firms producing traditional fuel vehicle (TFV) and those manufacturing NEVs, based on the game theory, in which both sides can adopt a cooperative or a non-cooperative strategy. Validated by an empirical analysis and other examples, the results demonstrate that, in a stock market, though the competition of market share between TFV and NEV firms is a zero-sum game, there still exists the possibility wherein firms can cooperate to achieve a win–win situation in terms of the profit. Importantly, by modeling the decision-making processes under governmental policies, we analyze the impacts of different regulation intensities on the promotion effect of NEVs. Grounded with data collected from the automobile manufacturing industry, our model illustrates that although the government’s subsidy has certain promoting effect on NEV marketing, it does not improve the profitability of the firms no matter from supply-side subsidy or consumer-side subsidy. With the gradual withdrawal of financial subsidies, dual credit policy will significantly contribute toward balancing the competition between TFVs and NEVs. Thus, this analysis is expected to provide a theoretical foundation that administrators can refer to when employing effective policy instruments to balance the competition between TFVs and NEVs, thereby steering the NEV industry toward a sustainable direction.

Payment schemes for sustaining cooperation in dynamic games

It is a challenge to sustain cooperation in a finite-horizon dynamic game. Since players generally have an incentive to deviate to their noncooperative strategies in the last stage, a backward induction argument leads them to defect from cooperation in all stages. In this paper, we propose two payment schemes having some desirable properties, namely, individual rationality and stability, which ensure that the players cooperate throughout the entire planning horizon. The setup and the results are general, that is, they do not rest on particular specifications of the payoff functionals or the state dynamics. We illustrate our results with a linear-quadratic dynamic game of pollution control.

Выявление роли функциональных стратегий в женском нарративе (на материале художественных текстов на немецком и русском языках)

The aim of the study is to reveal the implementation of functional cooperative and non-cooperative strategies in a female author’s narrative by the examples from the texts of German and Russian literary works. The scientific novelty lies in defining the notion “female narrative” and considering the functional strategies of a female author’s narrative within the framework of literary works. As a result, it is proven that the functional strategies of a female author’s narrative are most clearly seen in the process of communication. A narrator’s gender, depending on the language, is expressed in a narrative through grammatical, lexical means, and through a reader’s background knowledge.

Timing and magnitude of climate-driven range shifts in transboundary fish stocks challenge their management.

Climate change is shifting the distribution of shared fish stocks between neighboring countries’ Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs) and the high seas. The timescale of these transboundary shifts determines how climate change will affect international fisheries governance. Here, we explore this timescale by coupling a large ensemble simulation of an Earth system model under a high emission climate change scenario to a dynamic population model. We show that by 2030, 23% of transboundary stocks will have shifted and 78% of the world's EEZs will have experienced at least one shifting stock. By the end of this century, projections show a total of 45% of stocks shifting globally and 81% of EEZs waters with at least one shifting stock. The magnitude of such shifts is reflected in changes in catch proportion between EEZs sharing a transboundary stock. By 2030, global EEZs are projected to experience an average change of 59% in catch proportion of transboundary stocks. Many countries that are highly dependent on fisheries for livelihood and food security emerge as hotspots for transboundary shifts. These hotspots are characterized by early shifts in the distribution of an important number of transboundary stocks. Existing international fisheries agreements need to be assessed for their capacity to address the social–ecological implications of climate‐change‐driven transboundary shifts. Some of these agreements will need to be adjusted to limit potential conflict between the parties of interest. Meanwhile, new agreements will need to be anticipatory and consider these concerns and their associated uncertainties to be resilient to global change.

An Interactive Self-Learning Game and Evolutionary Approach Based on Non-Cooperative Equilibrium

Most current studies on multi-agent evolution based on deep learning take a cooperative equilibrium strategy, while interactive self-learning is not always considered. An interactive self-learning game and evolution method based on non-cooperative equilibrium (ISGE-NCE) is proposed to take the benefits of both game theory and interactive learning for multi-agent confrontation evolution. A generative adversarial network (GAN) is designed combining with multi-agent interactive self-learning, and the non-cooperative equilibrium strategy is well adopted within the framework of interactive self-learning, aiming for high evolution efficiency and interest. For assessment, three typical multi-agent confrontation experiments are designed and conducted. The results show that, first, in terms of training speed, the ISGE-NCE produces a training convergence rate of at least 46.3% higher than that of the method without considering interactive self-learning. Second, the evolution rate of the interference and detection agents reaches 60% and 80%, respectively, after training by using our method. In the three different experiment scenarios, compared with the DDPG, our ISGE-NCE method improves the multi-agent evolution effectiveness by 43.4%, 50%, and 20%, respectively, with low training costs. The performances demonstrate the significant superiority of our ISGE-NCE method in swarm intelligence.

A Sequential Reciprocity Game Model of International Tourism Cooperation under the Background of “One Belt and One Road”

ABSTRACT Based on Dufwenberg and Kirchsteiger’s sequential reciprocity game model, this study aims to establish the sequential reciprocal game model based on international tourism cooperation and analyzes the game behavior between China and a certain country. The findings indicate that a certain country that is rational or does not have enough reciprocal motivation will adopt the noncooperative strategy when China adopts the noncooperative strategy. A certain country that has enough reciprocal motivation will adopt the cooperative strategy when China adopts the cooperative strategy. Moreover, a certain country will adopt the cooperative strategy with certain probability when their reciprocity motivation lies between the above two cases. The conclusions will provide a positive reference for countries tourism cooperation decision.

Analysis of long-term strategies of riparian countries in transboundary river basins

Transboundary river basins give rise to complex water-sharing decision making that can be analyzed as a game in the sense of dynamic game theory, as done in this work. The sharing of transboundary water resources depends on the long-term shifting interactions between upstream and downstream countries, which has received limited research attention in the past. The water-sharing strategy of a riparian country depends on the strategies of other countries over time. This paper presents an evolutionary game method to analyze the long-term water-sharing strategies of countries encompassing transboundary river basins over time. The method analyzes the evolutionary strategies of riparian countries and investigates evolutionary stable strategies (ESSs) considering the payoff matrix. The evolutionary game method is applied to a river basin shared by three countries assuming two types of benefits and one type of cost to countries as decision variables of a game that reflects water use, economic and political gains, and socio-economic losses of countries. Numerical examples illustrate the strategies resulting from the evolutionary game processes and the role of several parameters on the interaction between riparian countries. The countries’ strategies are analyzed for several levels of benefits and costs, and the convergence of the strategies to a stable point is assessed. Results demonstrate the role that the upstream country’s potential benefits and the cost of conflict (i.e., non-cooperation) to other countries has on reaching a stable point in the game. This work’s results show the potential benefit to the upstream country under cooperative strategy must exceed its benefits from water use under non-cooperative strategy to gain the full stable cooperation of downstream countries. This work provides a method to resolve water-sharing strategies by countries sharing transboundary river basins and to evaluate the implications of cooperation or non-cooperation.

On the Retrial-Queuing Model for Strategic Access and Equilibrium-Joining Strategies of Cognitive Users in Cognitive-Radio Networks with Energy Harvesting

This article studies the strategic access of single-server retrial queue with two types of customers, where priority is given according to their category. On the basis of this concept, a cognitive-radio network was developed as retrial queue with energy harvesting. Cognitive radio allows for a secondary user to opportunistically access the idle spectrum of a primary user (PU). Upon arrival of a primary user, the service given to the secondary user by the cognitive radio is interrupted, and the PU band is available for the primary user. After completion of service for the primary user, the PU band is again available to secondary users. Performance metrics are derived to study the equilibrium strategies of secondary users. A Stackelberg game was formulated and Nash equilibrium was derived for the noncooperative strategy of the secondary user. Game-theory concepts are incorporated with queuing theory ideas to obtain the net benefit for the noncooperative strategy and social benefit for cooperative strategy. Lastly, analytical results are verified with numerical examples, and the effects of energy-harvesting rate are discussed.