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Dynamics at the Boundary of Game Theory and Distributed Computing

Published: 09 August 2017 Publication History

Abstract

We use ideas from distributed computing and game theory to study dynamic and decentralized environments in which computational nodes, or decision makers, interact strategically and with limited information. In such environments, which arise in many real-world settings, the participants act as both economic and computational entities. We exhibit a general non-convergence result for a broad class of dynamics in asynchronous settings. We consider implications of our result across a wide variety of interesting and timely applications: game dynamics, circuit design, social networks, Internet routing, and congestion control. We also study the computational and communication complexity of testing the convergence of asynchronous dynamics. Our work opens a new avenue for research at the intersection of distributed computing and game theory.

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Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation
ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation  Volume 5, Issue 3
August 2017
107 pages
ISSN:2167-8375
EISSN:2167-8383
DOI:10.1145/3129279
Issue’s Table of Contents
Publication rights licensed to ACM. ACM acknowledges that this contribution was authored or co-authored by an employee, contractor or affiliate of the United States government. As such, the Government retains a nonexclusive, royalty-free right to publish or reproduce this article, or to allow others to do so, for Government purposes only.

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Association for Computing Machinery

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Publication History

Published: 09 August 2017
Accepted: 01 March 2017
Revised: 01 March 2017
Received: 01 July 2016
Published in TEAC Volume 5, Issue 3

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Author Tags

  1. Adaptive heuristics
  2. game dynamics
  3. self stabilization

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Cited By

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  • (2023)Formal Algebraic Model of an Edge Data Center with a Redundant Ring TopologyNetwork10.3390/network30100073:1(142-157)Online publication date: 30-Jan-2023
  • (2020)PREStO: A Systematic Framework for Blockchain Consensus ProtocolsIEEE Transactions on Engineering Management10.1109/TEM.2020.298128667:4(1028-1044)Online publication date: Nov-2020
  • (2017)Multiplicative weights update with constant step-size in congestion gamesProceedings of the 31st International Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems10.5555/3295222.3295337(5874-5884)Online publication date: 4-Dec-2017

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