Utility Design via Egalitarian Non-Separable Contribution for Distributed Welfare Games

Abstract

A distributed welfare game is a game-theoretic model for a resource allocation problem which is to find an allocation to maximize the objective function of the system operator. In order to determine an allocation in a distributed way, each agent is assigned to an admissible utility function such that the resulting game possesses desirable properties, for example, scalability, the efficiency of pure Nash equilibria, and budget balance. For this end, a marginal contribution-based utility design is proposed. This utility function requires less computational effort than the previous research, while it has the same efficiency as those of the conventional utility design via Shapley value.