Acquisition Games with Partial-Asymmetric Information

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Abstract

We consider an example of stochastic games with partial, asymmetric and non-classical information. We obtain relevant equilibrium policies using a new approach which allows managing the belief updates in a structured manner. Agents have access only to partial information updates, and our approach is to consider optimal open loop control until the information update. The agents continuously control the rates of their Poisson search clocks to acquire the locks, the agent to get all the locks before others would get reward one. However, the agents have no information about the acquisition status of others and will incur a cost proportional to their rate process. We solved the problem for the case with two agents and many locks and conjectured the results for N-agents. We showed that a pair of (partial) state dependent time-threshold policies form a Nash equilibrium. We further obtained good structural properties of the thresholds.

Veeraruna Kavitha

Dr. Veeraruna Kavitha is an Assistant Professor at the Centre for Industrial Engineering and Operations Research (IEOR), Indian Institute Technology Bombay, Mumbai, India, since May 2012. Before joining IITB, she was a Principal Research Scientist at Mymo Wireless, Bangalore and SRM Research Institute, Bangalore, India from December 2011 to May 2012. She was a Post Doctoral Fellow at MAESTRO, INRIA and LIA, University Avignon, France from 2008 to 2011 and a Post-Doctoral Fellow at Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, Bangalore, India from 2007 to 2008. She obtained a Ph.D. degree from Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India in 2007 and a M.Sc (Engg) in 2002. Her research interests are broadly in Stochastic processes, Performance Analysis, Queuing Theory, Polling systems, Optimal control, Game theory, Stochastic approximation, and Wireless communications.