Information Design for Strategic Coordination of Autonomous Devices with Non-Aligned Utilities

TL;DR

This paper explores how autonomous devices with different goals can coordinate effectively using information design principles, characterizing equilibrium strategies and utility outcomes in rate-limited communication scenarios.

Contribution

It introduces a novel equilibrium characterization for encoding and decoding strategies in non-aligned utility settings using empirical coordination and auxiliary game frameworks.

Findings

Characterized equilibrium encoding and decoding functions.

Linked equilibrium solutions to auxiliary games with utility maximization.

Analyzed posterior distributions compatible with rate-limited channels.

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the coordination of autonomous devices with non-aligned utility functions. Both encoder and decoder are considered as players, that choose the encoding and the decoding in order to maximize their long-run utility functions. The topology of the point-to-point network under investigation, suggests that the decoder implements a strategy, knowing in advance the strategy of the encoder. We characterize the encoding and decoding functions that form an equilibrium, by using empirical coordination. The equilibrium solution is related to an auxiliary game in which both players choose some conditional distributions in order to maximize their expected utilities. This problem is closely related to the literature on "Information Design" in Game Theory. We also characterize the set of posterior distributions that are compatible with a rate-limited channel between the encoder and the decoder. Finally, we provide an example of non-aligned utility functions corresponding to parallel fading multiple access channels.