Valid Utility Games with Information Sharing Constraints

TL;DR

This paper examines how information sharing constraints affect the performance guarantees of valid utility games in multiagent systems and proposes methods to mitigate the degradation.

Contribution

It analyzes the impact of limited information on the guarantees of valid utility games and identifies subclasses of games where performance loss can be reduced.

Findings

Performance guarantees degrade with limited agent awareness.

Restricting to certain game subclasses mitigates the loss.

Theoretical bounds on the impact of information constraints.

Abstract

The use of game theoretic methods for control in multiagent systems has been an important topic in recent research. Valid utility games in particular have been used to model real-world problems; such games have the convenient property that the value of any decision set which is a Nash equilibrium of the game is guaranteed to be within 1/2 of the value of the optimal decision set. However, an implicit assumption in this guarantee is that each agent is aware of the decisions of all other agents. In this work, we first describe how this guarantee degrades as agents are only aware of a subset of the decisions of other agents. We then show that this loss can be mitigated by restriction to a relevant subclass of games.