Incentives for Early Arrival in Cooperative Games

Yaoxin Ge, Yao Zhang, Dengji Zhao, Zhihao Gavin Tang, Hu Fu, Pinyan Lu

Abstract: We study cooperative games where players join sequentially, and the value generated by those who have joined at any point must be irrevocably divided among these players. We introduce two desiderata for the value division mechanism: that the players should have incentives to join as early as possible, and that the division should be considered fair. For the latter, we require that each player's expected share in the mechanism should equal her Shapley value if the players' arrival order is uniformly at random.When the value generation function is submodular, allocating the marginal value to the player satisfies these properties. This is no longer true for more general functions. Our main technical contribution is a complete characterization of 0-1 value games for which desired mechanisms exist. We show that a natural mechanism, Rewarding First Critical Player (RFC), is complete, in that a 0-1 value function admits a mechanism with the properties above if and only if RFC satisfies them; we analytically characterize all such value functions. Moreover, we give an algorithm that decomposes, in an online fashion, any value function into 0-1 value functions, on each of which RFC can be run. In this way, we design an extension of RFC for general monotone games, and the properties are proved to be maintained.