Set Of Players Research Articles

An interval noncooperative-cooperative biform game model based on weighted equal contribution division values

This paper develops an interval noncooperative-cooperative biform game (referred to as the interval biform game in short hereafter) model that accounts for both strategy choice and coalition formation while also addressing profit allocation with interval coalition characteristic values. This interval biform game consists of four elements: a finite set of players, their strategy choices, coalitions, and interval coalition characteristic functions, and contains both noncooperative and cooperative parts. The payoffs of different strategies are not directly given a priori in the noncooperative part but obtained by solving interval cooperative games in the cooperative part. To solve the interval cooperative game, we extend a real-valued weighted equal contribution division (WECD) approach to an interval-valued version. Subsequently, an interval acceptability degree comparison method is introduced to compare the interval payoff values. We then establish existence and necessary conditions of pure strategy Nash equilibriums and derive a condition for a Nash equilibrium to be efficient in an interval biform game. Finally, numerical examples are furnished to illustrate the validity and applicability of the proposed framework.

Semi-tensor product approach for partially symmetric games

In this paper, a criterion for the partially symmetric game (PSG) is derived by using the semi-tensor product approach. The dimension and the basis of the linear subspace composed of all the PSGs with respect to a given set of partial players are calculated. The testing equations with the minimum number are concretely determined, and the computational complexity is analysed. Finally, two examples are displayed to show the theoretical results.

The Temporal Logic of Coalitional Goal Assignments in Concurrent Multiplayer Games

We introduce and study a natural extension of the Alternating time temporal logic ATL , called Temporal Logic of Coalitional Goal Assignments (TLCGA). It features one new and quite expressive coalitional strategic operator, called the coalitional goal assignment operator ⦉ γ ⦊, where γ is a mapping assigning to each set of players in the game its coalitional goal , formalised by a path formula of the language of TLCGA, i.e., a formula prefixed with a temporal operator X , U , or G , representing a temporalised objective for the respective coalition, describing the property of the plays on which that objective is satisfied. Then, the formula ⦉ γ ⦊ intuitively says that there is a strategy profile Σ for the grand coalition Agt such that for each coalition C , the restriction Σ | C of Σ to C is a collective strategy of C that enforces the satisfaction of its objective γ (C) in all outcome plays enabled by Σ | C . We establish fixpoint characterizations of the temporal goal assignments in a μ-calculus extension of TLCGA, discuss its expressiveness and illustrate it with some examples, prove bisimulation invariance and Hennessy–Milner property for it with respect to a suitably defined notion of bisimulation, construct a sound and complete axiomatic system for TLCGA, and obtain its decidability via finite model property.

The grand surplus value and repeated cooperative cross-games with coalitional collaboration

We propose a value for games with transferable utility, called the grand surplus value. This new value is an alternative to the Shapley value, in particular in games where, in the process of coalition formation, two overlapping coalitions can, at least hypothetically, guarantee their members their full worth simultaneously. Central is the concept of the grand surplus, which is the surplus that results when all coalitions, each lacking one player of the player set, no longer act individually but only cooperate as the grand coalition. All the axiomatizations presented have an analogous equivalent for the Shapley value, including the classics by Shapley and Young. Especially for a new class of games, called repeated cooperative cross-games with coalitional collaboration, the grand surplus value seems preferable to the Shapley value. A new concept, called multiple dividends, provides a close connection to the Shapley value.

Random Perfect Information Games

The paper proposes a natural measure space of zero-sum perfect information games with upper semicontinuous payoffs. Each game is specified by the game tree and by the assignment of the active player and the capacity to each node of the tree. The payoff in a game is defined as the infimum of the capacity over the nodes that have been visited during the play. The active player, the number of children, and the capacity are drawn from a given joint distribution independently across the nodes. We characterize the cumulative distribution function of the value v using the fixed points of the so-called value-generating function. The characterization leads to a necessary and sufficient condition for the event [Formula: see text] to occur with positive probability. We also study probabilistic properties of the set of player I’s k-optimal strategies and the corresponding plays.

Safe Pareto improvements for delegated game playing

A set of players delegate playing a game to a set of representatives, one for each player. We imagine that each player trusts their respective representative’s strategic abilities. Thus, we might imagine that per default, the original players would simply instruct the representatives to play the original game as best as they can. In this paper, we ask: are there safe Pareto improvements on this default way of giving instructions? That is, we imagine that the original players can coordinate to tell their representatives to only consider some subset of the available strategies and to assign utilities to outcomes differently than the original players. Then can the original players do this in such a way that the payoff is guaranteed to be weakly higher than under the default instructions for all the original players? In particular, can they Pareto-improve without probabilistic assumptions about how the representatives play games? In this paper, we give some examples of safe Pareto improvements. We prove that the notion of safe Pareto improvements is closely related to a notion of outcome correspondence between games. We also show that under some specific assumptions about how the representatives play games, finding safe Pareto improvements is NP-complete.

Strategic investments in distributed computing: A stochastic game perspective

We study a stochastic game with a dynamic set of players, for modeling and analyzing their computational investment strategies in distributed computing. Players obtain a certain reward for solving a problem, while incurring a certain cost based on the invested time and computational power. We present our framework while considering a contemporary application of blockchain mining, and show that the framework is applicable to certain other distributed computing settings as well. For an in-depth analysis, we consider a particular yet natural scenario where the rate of solving the problem is proportional to the total computational power invested by the players. We show that, in Markov perfect equilibrium, players with cost parameters exceeding a certain threshold, do not invest; while those with cost parameters less than this threshold, invest maximal power. We arrive at an interesting conclusion that the players need not have information about the system state as well as each others' parameters, namely, cost parameters and arrival/departure rates. With extensive simulations and insights through mean field approximation, we study the effects of players' arrival/departure rates and the system parameters on the players' utilities.

Effect of Information Technology on Banking Segment in the Indian Financial Growth

The current banking environment must be extremely competitive. IT refers to the acquisition, distribution, archiving, and dissemination of all kinds of information via computer technology and communication networks. The input is made using these technologies, Information is kept, distributed, and communicated. IT involves supplemental hardware, software and other such tools, services, etc. recent changes in the banking industry in The Internet is in India. Information technology (IT) is fundamental to the banking industry. Sector are fulfilling internal needs, processing data effectively, and expanding customer services, innovative help for the development of new products, and end-user training for nontechnical workers. The following are some new information technology trends in the banking industry: outsourcing, combining, differentiating IT as a Source of Income, Thriving in Down Market. Tests the Indian banking system in India must pass include Meet potential customers on customer retention, the bank's service and capacity, dealing with spreads, and maintaining the operating profit, taking into account the sector's current market share and the accomplishment from another set of players in the banking business reveals the same.

Growing Maize Root: Lectins Involved in Consecutive Stages of Cell Development

Proteins that carry specific carbohydrate-binding lectin domains have a great variety and are ubiquitous across the plant kingdom. In turn, the plant cell wall has a complex carbohydrate composition, which is subjected to constant changes in the course of plant development. In this regard, proteins with lectin domains are of great interest in the context of studying their contribution to the tuning and monitoring of the cell wall during its modifications in the course of plant organ development. We performed a genome-wide screening of lectin motifs in the Zea mays genome and analyzed the transcriptomic data from five zones of primary maize root with cells at different development stages. This allowed us to obtain 306 gene sequences encoding putative lectins and to relate their expressions to the stages of root cell development and peculiarities of cell wall metabolism. Among the lectins whose expression was high and differentially regulated in growing maize root were the members of the EUL, dirigent–jacalin, malectin, malectin-like, GNA and Nictaba families, many of which are predicted as cell wall proteins or lectin receptor-like kinases that have direct access to the cell wall. Thus, a set of molecular players was identified with high potential to play important roles in the early stages of root morphogenesis.

Beyond Organisational Borders: The Soft Power of Innovation in the Health Sector Comment on "What Managers Find Important for Implementation of Innovations in the Healthcare Sector - Practice Through Six Management Perspectives".

Health is not just a physiological state, it is also a relational phenomenon. This means health is a collective challenge, often a cross-border one. Diplomacy in the health sector has progressively received more attention from formal actors (national states, international organisations, etc) but after the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) challenge, this attention became a global emergency mobilising an expansive set of knowledge-seeking players (industry, research networks, civil society, etc). This paper comments on and leverages the contribution by Palm and Feschier on innovation management at the organisational level to address a complementary dimension: the internationalization process, and the need for a particular set of skills and routines to make innovations travel through different markets and regulatory contexts. Our argument is that marketing (knowing about customers) and diplomacy (understanding framing institutions) constitute a set of dynamic capabilities (soft power) that are critical for the effective internationalization of innovation.

Existence and Complexity of Approximate Equilibria in Weighted Congestion Games

We study the existence of approximate pure Nash equilibria (α-PNE) in weighted atomic congestion games with polynomial cost functions of maximum degree d. Previously, it was known that d-PNE always exist, whereas nonexistence was established only for small constants, namely, for 1.153-PNE. We improve significantly upon this gap, proving that such games in general do not have [Formula: see text]-PNE, which provides the first superconstant lower bound. Furthermore, we provide a black-box gap-introducing method of combining such nonexistence results with a specific circuit gadget, in order to derive NP-completeness of the decision version of the problem. In particular, by deploying this technique, we are able to show that deciding whether a weighted congestion game has an [Formula: see text]-PNE is NP-complete. Previous hardness results were known only for the special case of exact equilibria and arbitrary cost functions. The circuit gadget is of independent interest, and it allows us to also prove hardness for a variety of problems related to the complexity of PNE in congestion games. For example, we demonstrate that the question of existence of α-PNE, in which a certain set of players plays a specific strategy profile, is NP-hard for any [Formula: see text], even for unweighted congestion games. Finally, we study the existence of approximate equilibria in weighted congestion games with general (nondecreasing) costs, as a function of the number of players n. We show that n-PNE always exists, matched by an almost tight nonexistence bound of [Formula: see text], which we can again transform into an NP-completeness proof for the decision problem. Funding: Supported by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation with funds from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). D. Poças was also funded by FCT via LASIGE Research Unit, ref. UIDB/00408/2020 and ref. UIDP/00408/2020.

Partial recovery for top-k ranking: Optimality of MLE and SubOptimality of the spectral method

Given partially observed pairwise comparison data generated by the Bradley–Terry–Luce (BTL) model, we study the problem of top-k ranking. That is, to optimally identify the set of top-k players. We derive the minimax rate with respect to a normalized Hamming loss. This provides the first result in the literature that characterizes the partial recovery error in terms of the proportion of mistakes for top-k ranking. We also derive the optimal signal to noise ratio condition for the exact recovery of the top-k set. The maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) is shown to achieve both optimal partial recovery and optimal exact recovery. On the other hand, we show another popular algorithm, the spectral method, is in general suboptimal. Our results complement the recent work (Ann. Statist. 47 (2019) 2204–2235) that shows both the MLE and the spectral method achieve the optimal sample complexity for exact recovery. It turns out the leading constants of the sample complexity are different for the two algorithms. Another contribution that may be of independent interest is the analysis of the MLE without any penalty or regularization for the BTL model. This closes an important gap between theory and practice in the literature of ranking.

The Simulation of Aerobics Performance Based on Virtual Reality

The competition aerobics training project is based on the continuous summarization of experience, and on the basis of maintaining the characteristics of its own project, it also actively draws on the structure of other types of skills, and it is developed on the basis of further enriching the new “health, strength, and beauty” characteristics of competition aerobics training. This paper studies and analyzes the simulation of aerobics performance based on virtual reality. This paper firstly gives the definition of virtual reality and then studies and analyzes the action simulation recognition algorithm. The calculation methods of human action recognition usually include two types, the behavior recognition algorithm corresponding to the template and the behavior recognition algorithm based on the state space. And this paper studies the number of formation changes and the speed of the fitness aerobics complete set of movements. This paper analyzes the number and space usage of the aerobics complete sets of formation changing venues and also studies the positioning and moving paths of the aerobics complete sets of movement players. The experimental results show that the use of a complete set of three-dimensional space basically meets the requirements. The use of three-dimensional space in group B is more abundant than that in group A, and the total number of five types of space transformations is more than 10. The three groups and the two types of space have more conversions to reflect the sense of hierarchy, making the complete set of movements more active, but the number of conversions should be increased.

Optimal coalition structures for probabilistically monotone partition function games

For cooperative games with externalities, the problem of optimally partitioning a set of players into disjoint exhaustive coalitions is called coalition structure generation, and is a fundamental computational problem in multi-agent systems. Coalition structure generation is, in general, computationally hard and a large body of work has therefore investigated the development of efficient solutions for this problem. However, the existing methods are mostly limited to deterministic environments. In this paper, we focus attention on uncertain environments. Specifically, we define probabilistically monotone partition function games, a subclass of the well-known partition function games in which we introduce uncertainty. We provide a constructive proof that an exact optimum can be found using a greedy approach, present an algorithm for finding an optimum, and analyze its time complexity.

Cost Sharing over Combinatorial Domains

We study the problem of designing cost-sharing mechanisms for combinatorial domains. Suppose that multiple items or services are available to be shared among a set of interested agents. The outcome of a mechanism in this setting consists of an assignment, determining for each item the set of players who are granted service, together with respective payments. Although there are several works studying specialized versions of such problems, there has been almost no progress for general combinatorial cost-sharing domains until recently [ 9 ]. Still, many questions about the interplay between strategyproofness, cost recovery, and economic efficiency remain unanswered. The main goal of our work is to further understand this interplay in terms of budget balance and social cost approximation. Towards this, we provide a refinement of cross-monotonicity (which we term trace-monotonicity ) that is applicable to iterative mechanisms. The trace here refers to the order in which players become finalized. On top of this, we also provide two parameterizations (complementary to a certain extent) of cost functions, which capture the behavior of their average cost-shares. Based on our trace-monotonicity property, we design an Iterative Ascending Cost-Sharing Mechanism, which is applicable to the combinatorial cost-sharing setting with symmetric submodular valuations. Using our first cost function parameterization, we identify conditions under which our mechanism is weakly group-strategyproof, \( O(1) \) -budget-balanced, and \( O(H_n) \) -approximate with respect to the social cost. Furthermore, we show that our mechanism is budget-balanced and \( H_n \) -approximate if both the valuations and the cost functions are symmetric submodular; given existing impossibility results, this is best possible. Finally, we consider general valuation functions and exploit our second parameterization to derive a more fine-grained analysis of the Sequential Mechanism introduced by Moulin. This mechanism is budget balanced by construction, but in general, only guarantees a poor social cost approximation of \( n \) . We identify conditions under which the mechanism achieves improved social cost approximation guarantees. In particular, we derive improved mechanisms for fundamental cost-sharing problems, including Vertex Cover and Set Cover.

Coalition Formation Resource Sharing Games in Networks

Cooperative game theory deals with systems where players want to cooperate to improve their payoffs. But players may choose coalitions in a non-cooperative manner, leading to a coalition-formation game. We consider such a game with several players (willing to cooperate) and a possible adamant player (unwilling to cooperate) involved in resource-sharing. Here, the strategy of a player is the set of players with whom it wants to form a coalition. Given a strategy profile, an appropriate partition of coalitions is formed; players in each coalition maximize their collective utilities leading to a non-cooperative resource-sharing game among the coalitions, the (unique) utilities at the resulting equilibrium are shared via Shapley-value; these shares define the utilities of players for the given strategy profile in the coalition-formation game. We also consider the utilitarian solution to derive the price of anarchy.

A new model for predicting the winner in tennis based on the eigenvector centrality

The use of statistical tools for predicting the winner in tennis matches has enjoyed an increase in popularity over the last two decades and, currently, a variety of methods are available. In particular, paired comparison approaches make use of latent ability estimates or rating calculations to determine the probability that a player will win a match. In this paper, we extend this latter class of models by using network indicators for the predictions. We propose a measure based on eigenvector centrality. Unlike what happens for the standard paired comparisons class (where the rates or latent abilities only change at time t for those players involved in the matches at time t), the use of a centrality measure allows the ratings of the whole set of players to vary every time there is a new match. The resulting ratings are then used as a covariate in a simple logit model. Evaluating the proposed approach with respect to some popular competing specifications, we find that the centrality-based approach largely and consistently outperforms all the alternative models considered in terms of the prediction accuracy. Finally, the proposed method also achieves positive betting results.

Identity development in institutional change of international branch campuses in Malaysia: an empirical study

ABSTRACT While existing research has explored the development of international branch campuses (IBCs) in Malaysia from several dimensions, the discussion on the IBCs’ identity development within the dynamics of higher education internationalisation can benefit from further elucidation. Applying the framework of institutional change, this research inquired how Malaysian IBCs proceeded with identity development in their institutional change and fit into the internationalisation agenda as a new set of players. Semi-structured interviews and non-participant observation were used to collect data, along with relevant documents used subsidiarily in the study. The results showed that the IBCs experienced various identity development processes in their institutional changes, showing a stable growth and enrichment of international, regional, and local elements. The identity development within IBCs’ institutional change sheds light on the development of higher education internationalisation.

Stability kernel in finite games with perturbed payoffs

Abstract The parametric concept of equilibrium in a finite cooperative game of several players in a normal form is introduced. This concept is defined by the partitioning of a set of players into coalitions. Two extreme cases of such partitioning correspond to Pareto optimal and Nash equilibrium outcomes, respectively. The game is characterized by its matrix, in which each element is a subject for independent perturbations., i.e. a set of perturbing matrices is formed by a set of additive matrices, with two arbitrary Hölder norms specified independently in the outcome and criterion spaces. We undertake post-optimal analysis for the so-called stability kernel. The analytical expression for supreme levels of such perturbations is found. Numerical examples illustrate some of the pertinent cases.

Comprehensive expression analysis for the core cell cycle regulators in the chicken embryo reveals novel tissue-specific synexpression groups and similarities and differences with expression in mouse, frog and zebrafish.

The core cell cycle machinery is conserved from yeast to humans, and hence it is assumed that all vertebrates share the same set of players. Yet during vertebrate evolution, the genome was duplicated twice, followed by a further genome duplication in teleost fish. Thereafter, distinct genes were retained in different vertebrate lineages; some individual gene duplications also occurred. To which extent these diversifying tendencies were compensated by retaining the same expression patterns across homologous genes is not known. This study for the first time undertook a comprehensive expression analysis for the core cell cycle regulators in the chicken, focusing in on early neurula and pharyngula stages of development, with the latter representing the vertebrate phylotypic stage. We also compared our data with published data for the mouse, Xenopus and zebrafish, the other established vertebrate models. Our work shows that, while many genes are expressed widely, some are upregulated or specifically expressed in defined tissues of the chicken embryo, forming novel synexpression groups with markers for distinct developmental pathways. Moreover, we found that in the neural tube and in the somite, mRNAs of some of the genes investigated accumulate in a specific subcellular localisation, pointing at a novel link between the site of mRNA translation, cell cycle control and interkinetic nuclear movements. Finally, we show that expression patterns of orthologous genes may differ in the four vertebrate models. Thus, for any study investigating cell proliferation, cell differentiation, tissue regeneration, stem cell behaviour and cancer/cancer therapy, it has to be carefully examined which of the observed effects are due to the specific model organism used, and which can be generalised.