ALOP-Colloquium with Prof. Dr. Tobias Harks, Augsburg University

On Monday, April 19, 2021 at 16:00 c.t. Prof. Dr. Tobias Harks of Augsburg University will present his recent work at our colloquium entitled

Pricing in Resource Allocation Games

We consider a basic resource allocation game, where the players’ strategy spaces are subsets of R^m and cost/utility functions are parameterized by some common vector u \in∈ R^m and, otherwise, only depend on the own strategy choice. A strategy of a player can be interpreted as a vector of resource consumption and a joint strategy profile naturally leads to an aggregate consumption vector. Resources can be priced, that is, the game is augmented by a price vector \lambda\inλR^m_+ and players have quasi-linear overall costs/utilities meaning that in addition to the original costs/utilities, a player needs to pay the corresponding price per consumed unit.

We investigate the following question: for which aggregated consumption vectors u can we find prices \lambdaλ that induce an equilibrium realizing the targeted consumption profile? For answering this question, we revisit a well-known duality-based framework and derive several characterizations of the existence of such u and \lambda. We show that the characterization can help to unify parts of several largely independent streams in the literature – tolls in transportation systems, Walrasian market equilibria, trading networks, energy networks and congestion control in communication networks. Besides reproving existing results we establish novel existence results by using methods from polyhedral combinatorics, global optimization and discrete convexity.

The presentation will take place via Zoom. A link will be email prior to the event.

If you wish to receive a link and invitation to this presentation, please send an email to shawATuni-trier.de