Strategic Coalitions in Networked Contest Games

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Diaz-Garcia, Gilberto; Bullo, Francesco; Marden, Jason R.
• 署名单位: University of California System; University of California Santa Barbara
• 刊物名称: IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON AUTOMATIC CONTROL
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0018-9286
• DOI: 10.1109/TAC.2025.3623942
• 发表日期: 2026

摘要

In competitive resource allocation formulations, multiple agents compete over different contests by committing their limited resources to them. For these settings, contest games offer a game-theoretic foundation to analyze how players can efficiently invest their resources. In this class of games, the resulting behavior can be affected by external interactions among the players. In particular, players may be able to make coalitions that allow transferring resources among them, seeking to improve their outcome. In this work, we study bilateral budgetary transfers in contest games played over networks. Particularly, we characterize the family of networks where there exist mutually beneficial bilateral transfers for some set of system parameters. With this in mind, we provide sufficient conditions for the existence of mutually beneficial transfers. Moreover, we provide a constructive argument that guarantees that the benefit of making coalitions only depends on mild connectivity conditions of the graph structure. Lastly, we provide a characterization of the improvement of the utilities as a function of the transferred budget. Further, we demonstrate how gradient-based dynamics can be utilized to find desirable coalitional structures. Interestingly, our findings demonstrate that such collaborative opportunities extend well beyond the typical enemy-of-my-enemy alliances.