Game theory is an established branch of mathematics that offers a rich set of mathematical tools for multi-person strategic decision making that can be used to model the interactions of decision makers in security problems who compete for limited and shared resources. This article presents a review of the literature in the area of game theoretical modelling of network/cybersecurity.
Film release dates play an important part in box office revenues because of the facts of obvious seasonality demand in the film industry and severe competition among films shown at the same time. In this paper, we study how film studios choose release time for movies they produce to maximize their box offices. We first formalize this problem as an attraction competition game where players (film studios) consider both potential profits and competitors choices when deciding the release time. Then we prove that there always exists a pure Nash equilibrium and give the sufficient condition of the uniqueness of the Nash equilibrium. Our model can be generalized to an extensive game and we compute the subgame-perfect equilibrium for homogeneous players. For the case that one film studio could have multiple movies to release, we prove that finding a players best response is NP-hard and it does not guarantee the existence of a pure Nash equilibrium. Experiments are provided to support the soundness of our model. In the final state, most of film studios, accounting for 84 percent of the market, would not change their release time. The behaviors of film studios imply they are following some strategies to reach a Nash equilibrium.
We study the game of go from a complex network perspective. We construct a directed network using a suitable definition of tactical moves including local patterns, and study this network for different datasets of professional tournaments and amateur games. The move distribution follows Zipfs law and the network is scale free, with statistical peculiarities different from other real directed networks, such as e. g. the World Wide Web. These specificities reflect in the outcome of ranking algorithms applied to it. The fine study of the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of matrices used by the ranking algorithms singles out certain strategic situations. Our results should pave the way to a better modelization of board games and other types of human strategic scheming.
We formalize the current practice of strategic mining in multi-cryptocurrency markets as a game, and prove that any better-response learning in such games converges to equilibrium. We then offer a reward design scheme that moves the system configuration from any initial equilibrium to a desired one for any better-response learning of the miners. Our work introduces the first multi-coin strategic attack for adaptive and learning miners, as well as the study of reward design in a multi-agent system of learning agents.
EcoTRADE is a multi player network game of a virtual biodiversity credit market. Each player controls the land use of a certain amount of parcels on a virtual landscape. The biodiversity credits of a particular parcel depend on neighboring parcels, which may be owned by other players. The game can be used to study the strategies of players in experiments or classroom games and also as a communication tool for stakeholders participating in credit markets that include spatially interdependent credits.
How users in a dynamic system perform learning and make decision become more and more important in numerous research fields. Although there are some works in the social learning literatures regarding how to construct belief on an uncertain system state, few study has been conducted on incorporating social learning with decision making. Moreover, users may have multiple concurrent decisions on different objects/resources and their decisions usually negatively influence each others utility, which makes the problem even more challenging. In this paper, we propose an Indian Buffet Game to study how users in a dynamic system learn the uncertain system state and make multiple concurrent decisions by not only considering the current myopic utility, but also taking into account the influence of subsequent users decisions. We analyze the proposed Indian Buffet Game under two different scenarios: customers request multiple dishes without budget constraint and with budget constraint. For both cases, we design recursive best response algorithms to find the subgame perfect Nash equilibrium for customers and characterize special properties of the Nash equilibrium profile under homogeneous setting. Moreover, we introduce a non-Bayesian social learning algorithm for customers to learn the system state, and theoretically prove its convergence. Finally, we conduct simulations to validate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithms.