Resource Task Games

In this work, we introduce Resource Task Games (RTGs), a model of cooperative strategic interactions generalising Wooldridge and Dunne’s Coalitional Resource Games. In RTGs, agents are endowed with different types of resources, which can be put towards graded completion of certain tasks. Agents have preferences over the states of completion of these tasks and can allocate resources in cooperation with other agents. We introduce a notion of core for RTGs and investigate the existence and computation of stable outcomes and core-related closure properties. We show that RTGs are sufficiently expressive to encode Transferable Utility (TU) games efficiently, providing a construction from an arbitrary TU game to an RTG that preserves the core. We provide the computational complexity classes of problems relating to the core of these games, including bounds on the polynomial hierarchy for each problem.

Authors

• Jessica L. Newman University of Southampton
• Enrico Gerding University of Southampton
• Enrico Marchioni University of Southampton
• Baharak Rastegari University of Southampton

Keywords

• Coalitional games
• Resources
• Computational complexity
• Multiagent systems
• Core
• Coalitions
• Transferable Utility Games