Composition Games for Distributed Systems: the EU Grant games

TL;DR

This paper studies how agents form groups in distributed systems, analyzing game-theoretic models to improve system efficiency by balancing connection benefits and costs, emphasizing agreement and appeal mechanisms.

Contribution

It introduces and analyzes three realistic composition games, showing how protocol modifications can significantly reduce the price of anarchy in distributed systems.

Findings

Simple protocol changes improve the price of anarchy

Agreement in joining systems is crucial for efficiency

Allowing appeals from rejections enhances system stability

Abstract

We analyze ways by which people decompose into groups in distributed systems. We are interested in systems in which an agent can increase its utility by connecting to other agents, but must also pay a cost that increases with the size of the sys- tem. The right balance is achieved by the right size group of agents. We formulate and analyze three intuitive and realistic games and show how simple changes in the protocol can dras- tically improve the price of anarchy of these games. In partic- ular, we identify two important properties for a low price of anarchy: agreement in joining the system, and the possibil- ity of appealing a rejection from a system. We show that the latter property is especially important if there are some pre- existing constraints regarding who may collaborate (or com- municate) with whom.