Two-tier Game Research Articles

Resource nationalism: the intersection of politics and economics

Resource nationalism has a complex economic, political, and cultural history and reality. The evolution of the supply and demand structure of the global mineral metal market influences it. It is closely linked to the “economic-political” system within resource-rich countries. We analyze the ‘economic-political’ logic of resource nationalist behavior using the two-tier game theory. We examine 261 cases of resource nationalism since 1990 and test the theoretical hypotheses using quantitative techniques. The results show that rising mineral prices are the main trigger for contemporary resource nationalism. However, ideology, institutional quality, social climate, and economic dependence within resource countries play a non-negligible role. Resource wealth dependence in host countries makes it difficult for policymakers to escape national resource interventions. We argue that (1) The global economic trading system imbalance is the root of resource nationalism. (2) Resource nationalism is an endeavor by resource-rich countries to seek entitlements from mineral resource endowments. (3) Resource nationalism is not a zero-sum competition in the national economic trading system. In the face of the potential risks posed by resource nationalism to the global supply of minerals, the relevant interest groups should have sufficient strategic reserves to cope with the possible game of interests.

A New Distributed Robust Power Control for Two-Layer Cooperative Communication Networks in Smart Grids with Reduced Utility Costs

The packet loss during transmission of load control commands can lead to regulation errors in the smart grid and increase the cost of utility agencies due to the purchase of additional automatic generation control (AGC) services. In this paper, a two-layer cooperative communication network between the utility company and relays is presented. The utility company rents the relay to assist with the downlink transmission to improve the reliability of communication and reduce the data transmission cost due to packet loss. Furthermore, the uncertainty of channel gain is considered, and a two-tier game model is established. A distributed robust power control algorithm based on the continuous convex approximation method is proposed to obtain the optimal relay power allocation and price. Through the simulation analysis of the proposed scheme and the two comparison schemes, the cost of the utility company was reduced by 6% and 21%, and the standard deviation of income value between the relays was reduced by 40% and 48%, respectively.

Countermeasures of Financial Internal Supervision Institutions of Administrative Institutions Based on the Double Game

The state audit in the new era focuses on strengthening the restriction and supervision of public power, and it will inevitably require strengthening the audit and supervision of administrative institutions, which leads to the discussion of the efficiency of the internal supervision institutions in administrative institutions. In order to effectively control the finance internal supervision risk, a moral hazard monitoring model with a two-tier game mechanism is proposed. In the model, it establishes an upper-level game and a lower-level game analysis framework for the "lazy" and "Free-riding" behaviors in moral hazard. Combining the equilibrium conditions to explain the game results, and put forward the overall risk monitoring countermeasures for the two behaviors.

Deterministic dynamic Stackelberg games: Time-consistent open-loop solution

In this paper, the known deterministic linear-quadratic Stackelberg game is revisited, whose open-loop Stackelberg solution actually possesses the nature of time inconsistency. To handle this time inconsistency, a two-tier game framework is introduced: the upper-tier game works according to Stackelberg’s scenario between a leader and a follower, and the outcomes of two lower-tier intertemporal games characterize, respectively, the follower’s and the leader’s response controls that mimic the notion of time-consistent open-loop equilibrium control in existing literature. The obtained open-loop equilibrium of this two-tier game is shown to be weakly time-consistent in the sense that the adopted policies will no longer be denied in the future only if past policies are consistent with the equilibrium policies. On the existence and uniqueness of such a solution, necessary and sufficient conditions are obtained, which are characterized via the solutions of several Riccati-like equations.

A two-tier game model based scheduling strategy for Virtual Power Plants

Recently, there has been a lot of attention on how to enhance the management capabilities of distributed electricity production and demand aggregation by Virtual Power Plants (VPPs), which poses the challenge of leveraging their ability to participate in electricity markets to maximize operating profits. This paper analyzes the scheduling problem in fully distributed controlled VPP and proposes a two-level game model. In this model, the Stackelberg game is used to describe the interaction between Distributed Energy Resources (DER) and Energy Management System (EMS). On the other hand, the competition between DERs is formulated by the Cournot game. EMS sets its electric rate as single-leader, and DERs generate the optimal generation capacity accordingly as multi-follower. Then, we analyze and obtain the relationship between the demand and the resource supply to achieve market equilibrium on maximizing the utility of EMS and DERs. Simulation results show the analysis’s correctness and the proposed strategies’ performance improvement.

Incomplete Information Based Collaborative Computing in Emergency Communication Networks

Due to the urgent and unpredictable nature of disaster relief, emergency management systems (EMS) faces an enormous challenge of real-time data analysis without the complete information from emergency communication networks (ECNs). In this letter, we propose an incomplete information based two-tier game model (IITG) to realize collaborative computing at the edge of ECNs, which incentivizes idle computing devices (ICDs) to share computation resources through maximizing utilities of EMS and ICDs. Furthermore, we develop a near-optimal IITG algorithm (N-IITG) to seek the unique Bayesian Nash equilibrium. Simulation results reveal that N-IITG outperforms the existing incomplete information based methods in terms of computation latency and participants utilities.

Collusion or Not: The optimal choice of competing retailers in a closed-loop supply chain

While previous studies overlook the collusive behavior of retailers under bidirectional competition, we study a closed-loop supply chain (CLSC) consisting of one manufacturer and two competing retailers whose competition exists in the forward and reverse channels. Considering the retailers' potential collusive behavior and the upstream manufacturer's interactive decisions, we build three two-tier game models: Stackelberg-collusion model, Stackelberg-Nash model, and Stackelberg-Stackelberg model. We first obtain the equilibrium decisions of the manufacturer and the retailers in the three models. Furthermore, we investigate whether collusion is beneficial to the two retailers. We find that the retailers' collusion always brings remarkable profit improvement to them as a whole, while the smaller retailers may suffer severe profit loss. A profit-sharing contract is, therefore, designed to guarantee that each retailer can gain more profit by collusion. We also compare the environmental benefit and social welfare among the three models and find that collusion may do harm to the environment or social welfare compared with other models.

5G Network Communication, Caching, and Computing Algorithms Based on the Two-Tier Game Model

In this study, we developed hybrid control algorithms in smart base stations (SBSs) along with devised communication, caching, and computing techniques. In the proposed scheme, SBSs are equipped with computing power and data storage to collectively offload the computation from mobile user equipment and to cache the data from clouds. To combine in a refined manner the communication, caching, and computing algorithms, game theory is adopted to characterize competitive and cooperative interactions. The main contribution of our proposed scheme is to illuminate the ultimate synergy behind a fully integrated approach, while providing excellent adaptability and flexibility to satisfy the different performance requirements. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approach can outperform existing schemes by approximately 5% to 15% in terms of bandwidth utilization, access delay, and system throughput.

On Adversarial Games in Dynamic Spectrum Access Networking based Covert Timing Channels?

In this paper, we study tactical covert timing networks with dynamic spectrum access capability amidst adversaries. We present a two-tier game framework to model the attackdefense scenario. There are very few studies available in the literature on covert timing channels with multiple parallel transmissions. This paper presents a new paradigm combining the time diversity provided by covert timing channels and frequency diversity provided by dynamic spectrum switching, to combat jamming. The dynamic sensing of different spectrum bands and subsequent jamming by the attacker, and the camouflaging defense by the covert network are modeled as a two-tier game. We present a dynamic minimax camouflaging strategy for the covert network and sensing and jamming strategies for the attacker. We compare the performance of our proposed equilibrium strategies with that of other well known strategies and demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed solution. We use theoretical analysis, simulations and testbed experiments to illustrate our ideas.