Resource allocation games with changing resource capacities

In this paper we study a class of resource allocation games which are inspired by the El Farol Bar problem. We consider a system of competitive agents that have to choose between several resources characterized by their time dependent capacities. The agents using a particular resource are rewarded if their number does not exceed the resource capacity, and punished otherwise. Agents use a set of strategies to decide what resource to choose, and use a simple reinforcement learning scheme to update the accuracy of strategies. A strategy in our model is simply a lookup table that suggests to an agent what resource to choose based on the actions of its neighbors at the previous time step. In other words, the agents form a social network whose connectivity controls the average number of neighbors with whom each agent interacts. This statement of the adaptive resource allocation problem allows us to fully parameterize it by a small set of numbers. We study the behavior of the system via nume...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: ATAL
• Authors: Aram Galstyan, Shashikiran Kolar, Kristina Lerman
• Keywords: ATAL 2003, Resource, Resource Allocation, Resource Allocation Games