Be a Leader or Become a Follower: The Strategy to Commit to with Multiple Leaders

Be a Leader or Become a Follower: The Strategy to Commit to with Multiple Leaders

Matteo Castiglioni, Alberto Marchesi, Nicola Gatti

Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 123-129. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2019/18

We study the problem of computing correlated strategies to commit to in games with multiple leaders and followers. To the best of our knowledge, this problem is widely unexplored so far, as the majority of the works in the literature focus on games with a single leader and one or more followers. The fundamental ingredient of our model is that a leader can decide whether to participate in the commitment or to defect from it by taking on the role of follower. This introduces a preliminary stage where, before the underlying game is played, the leaders make their decisions to reach an agreement on the correlated strategy to commit to. We distinguish three solution concepts on the basis of the constraints that they enforce on the agreement reached by the leaders. Then, we provide a comprehensive study of the properties of our solution concepts, in terms of existence, relation with other solution concepts, and computational complexity.
Keywords:
Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Noncooperative Games
Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Algorithmic Game Theory
Agent-based and Multi-agent Systems: Economic Paradigms, Auctions and Market-Based Systems