On the coordination efficiency of strategic multi-agent robotic teams

Marcos M. Vasconcelos, Behrouz Touri

Abstract: We study the problem of achieving decentralized coordination by a group of strategic decision makers choosing to engage or not in a task in a stochastic setting. First, we define a class of symmetric utility games that encompass a broad class of coordination games, including the popular framework known as \textit{global games}. With the goal of studying the extent to which agents engaging in a stochastic coordination game indeed coordinate, we propose a new probabilistic measure of coordination efficiency. Then, we provide an universal information theoretic upper bound on the coordination efficiency as a function of the amount of noise in the observation channels. Finally, we revisit a large class of global games, and we illustrate that their Nash equilibrium policies may be less coordination efficient then certainty equivalent policies, despite of them providing better expected utility. This counter-intuitive result, establishes the existence of a nontrivial trade-offs between coordination efficiency and expected utility in coordination games.