Achieving Robust Performance using Minimal Communication in Resource Allocation Games

Abstract: Increasingly, resource allocation games are being proposed to model team coordination in denied communication environments. Of particular interest is understanding the impact of communication denial on the quality of emergent team coordination. In this work, we consider the situation with an arbitrary communication network and use the Price of Anarchy to quantify the quality of emergent behavior. Our main result is a computationally efficient algorithm that calculates a minimal communication network that has the same performance guarantee as the full information case. Additionally, we provide efficient algorithms that compute a Nash and a strict Nash equilibrium in the full information setting. Finally to support these algorithms, we provide sufficient conditions for the existence of a strict Nash equilibrium, characterize strict Nash equilibria across all communication networks, and show that each strict Nash equilibrium in the full information case has a necessary and sufficient set of communication links that induce it. We conclude by giving an execution time experiment of the proposed algorithm and examine several example games.