International Game Theory Review

The shape of cost functions significantly influences the solution of optimization problems related to the treatment of infectious diseases. The classical linear or quadratic cost functions are widely used in the literature more to make the problems tractable than for their relevance with the model studied. For example, they do not seem appropriate when expensive therapies are required to treat a large number of patients, as in the case of the treatment of hepatitis C by sofosbuvir. In this paper, we study the strategic interactions between pharmaceutical companies and public authorities to determine the price of patented drugs and the number of treated infected people. A Stackelberg game and a Nash bargaining game are studied. In particular, we analyze the relationship between the different cost functions and the equilibria of the games.

Public–Private Partnership (PPP) approaches in provision of public infrastructure projects usually involve conflicts. A win–win situation would be the desired goal of such collaborations for both public and private parties. However, stakeholders’ behaviors might result in undesirable worse conditions. Identification and interpretation of the involved parties’ individualistic behaviors to PPP problems can be addressed by game theory where it describes the inclinations and interactions of different parties who are in search of satisfying their self-interest-based objectives rather than system-wide approaches. Outcomes predicted by game theory, which are based on individuality, often differ from those presented by conventional optimization methods and they are more realistic. This study mainly scrutinizes the applicability of game theory into PPP rail projects and conflict resolution. The paper also evaluates the dynamic structure of the PPP problems and highlights the importance of consideration of the game’s evolutionary nature while studying such problems.

The production of natural resource-based commodities is frequently affected by environmental uncertainty and the strategic response of producers to uncertainty. We ask when uncertainty induces cooperation. Using a model of Cournot competition under environmentally induced price uncertainty, we consider the conditions under which cooperation is favored over defection. We find that the probability of cooperation depends on the length of the time period over which production levels are adjusted to price shocks. When uncertainty is low, the probability of cooperation is monotonically increasing in the length of this adjustment period. When uncertainty is high, the probability of cooperation initially increases as the adjustment period lengthens, but beyond some threshold starts to fall. In this case, the expected outcome is defection. We consider the broader implications of these findings.

Briata, F. and Fragnelli, V. [2017] Free-riding in common facility sharing, in Transaction on Computation Collective Intelligence XXVII, pp. 129–138. dealt with the inefficiency and the free-riding situations that may arise from sharing the maintenance cost of a facility among its potential users and from dividing the cost of a check to assess who the users are among the agents that asked for it.They introduced two mechanisms for reducing the free-riding behaviors and considered the possibility that the check provides also information on the level at which the facility is used by each agent.

In this paper, we improve the profitability of the check, introducing a TU-cost game for determining the quota of the total cost assigned to each agent in order to satisfy as many agents as possible. Two solutions are proposed and analyzed and the balancedness of the TU-cost game is studied and characterized.

This paper provides nonemptiness results of approximate interim cores with endogenous communication in large quasilinear economies, where every agent’s informational size is small. We offer results for both replica and more general sequences of economies.

The concept of a globally strong uninvadable set of profiles is studied for asymmetric evolutionary games. After establishing a general result concerning weak $\omega$-limit points of the replicator dynamics trajectories, we prove that globally strong uninvadable sets are weak attracting.

We give a criterion of positivity for the value of a matrix game. We use the criterion to investigate conditions of positivity of value for two classes of games: payoff matrices with all elements outside of the main diagonal having the same sign and symmetric payoff matrices.