On the Payoff Mechanisms in Peer-Assisted Services with Multiple Content Providers: Rationality and Fairness
Jeong-woo Cho, Yung Yi

TL;DR
This paper analyzes incentive and stability issues in peer-assisted services with multiple content providers, revealing the instability of grand coalitions and proposing a fair payoff mechanism to regulate provider cooperation.
Contribution
It introduces a generalized payoff formula for multi-provider peer-assisted services and demonstrates the instability of grand coalitions, proposing a new fair payoff mechanism.
Findings
Grand coalition is unstable even with concave cost functions.
Existence of non-convergent coalition structures under dynamic conditions.
Proposed a stable, fair payoff mechanism to regulate provider cooperation.
Abstract
This paper studies an incentive structure for cooperation and its stability in peer-assisted services when there exist multiple content providers, using a coalition game theoretic approach. We first consider a generalized coalition structure consisting of multiple providers with many assisting peers, where peers assist providers to reduce the operational cost in content distribution. To distribute the profit from cost reduction to players (i.e., providers and peers), we then establish a generalized formula for individual payoffs when a "Shapley-like" payoff mechanism is adopted. We show that the grand coalition is unstable, even when the operational cost functions are concave, which is in sharp contrast to the recently studied case of a single provider where the grand coalition is stable. We also show that irrespective of stability of the grand coalition, there always exist coalition…
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Taxonomy
TopicsGame Theory and Voting Systems · Game Theory and Applications · Auction Theory and Applications
