Fair Incentives for Early Arrival in 0-1 Cooperative Games

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new fairness mechanism called Egalitarian Value-Sharing (EVS) for online 0-1 cooperative games, ensuring fair value distribution aligned with the Shapley value in expectation.

Contribution

It proposes a novel mechanism that refines fairness in online cooperative games by minimizing distribution distance to the Shapley value and maximizing egalitarian welfare.

Findings

EVS mechanism effectively approximates the Shapley value in online settings.

The mechanism maximizes egalitarian welfare among contributing players.

It addresses fairness issues in early arrival scenarios.

Abstract

Incentives for early arrival (I4EA) was recently proposed for studying online cooperative games. In an online cooperative game, players arrive in an unknown order, and the value increase after each player arrived should be distributed immediately among all the arrived players. Although there is only one arriving order in the game, we also hope that the value distribution is equal to their Shapley value in expectation. To achieve these goals, the early solutions ignored the fairness in each single arriving order. More specifically, an important player may receive nothing in a game, which seems unfair in reality. To combat this, we propose refined fairness in this paper and design new solutions in 0-1 value games. Specifically, we compute the distance of the distribution in each order to the Shapley value and aim to minimize it. We propose a new mechanism called Egalitarian Value-Sharing (EVS) to do so. We also show that the mechanism can maximize the egalitarian welfare among all the players who made contributions.