2024/08/01 by Gilberto Díaz-García, Francesco Bullo, Diaz-Garcia, Gilberto +3
Decision Sciences · Economics, Econometrics and Finance · #Auction Theory and Applications #Computer Science and Game Theory (cs.GT) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #Game Theory and Applications #Game Theory and Voting Systems #Systems and Control (eess.SY) #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2408.00883
openalex publication_date 2024/08/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
In competitive resource allocation formulations multiple agents compete over different contests by committing their limited resources in them. For these settings, contest games offer a game-theoretic foundation to analyze how players can efficiently invest their resources. In this class of games the resulting behavior can be affected by external interactions among the players. In particular, players could be able to make coalitions that allow transferring resources among them, seeking to improve their outcomes. In this work, we study bilateral budgetary transfers in contest games played over networks. Particularly, we characterize the family of networks where there exist mutually beneficial bilateral transfer for some set of systems parameters. With this in mind, we provide sufficient conditions for the existence of mutually beneficial transfers. Moreover, we provide a constructive argument that guarantees that the benefit of making coalitions only depends on mild connectivity conditions of the graph structure. Lastly, we provide a characterization of the improvement of the utilities as a function of the transferred budget. Further, we demonstrate how gradient-based dynamics can be utilized to find desirable coalitional structures. Interestingly, our findings demonstrate that such collaborative opportunities extend well beyond the typical "enemy-of-my-enemy" alliances.