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SUMMARY:On Agent Failures in Totally Balanced Cooperative Games - Nisarg S
 hah\, Microsoft Research
DTSTART:20120802T130000Z
DTEND:20120802T140000Z
UID:TALK39180@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Microsoft Research Cambridge Talks Admins
DESCRIPTION:Cooperative game theory is used to analyze how selfish agents\
 , who must cooperate to achieve their goals\, might work together and shar
 e the resulting gains. One prominent solution concept\, known as the core\
 , requires that no subset of agents should have any incentive to defect an
 d work on its own. Existential and computational questions regarding the c
 ore are widely studied in the literature. However\, most models assume tha
 t all the agents would always be able to fill their role and that there ar
 e no failures. This is hardly the case in reality. The recent model of the
  reliability extension formalizes the notion of independent agent failures
  in cooperative games. \n\nIn this talk\, I will use this model to demonst
 rate the effect of such failures on the class of totally balanced games an
 d the more specific subclass of convex games. Totally balanced games are g
 ames where the core is non-empty in every subgame. I will show that totall
 y balanced games remain totally balanced even under failures. I will then 
 present an algorithm to compute such a core solution. These results lead t
 o some interesting discoveries regarding the effect of failures on existen
 ce of the core.
LOCATION:Small lecture theatre\, Microsoft Research Ltd\, 7 J J Thomson Av
 enue (Off Madingley Road)\, Cambridge
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