Participation Incentives in Online Cooperative Games
Haris Aziz, Yuhang Guo, Zhaohong Sun
TL;DR
The study addresses incentive design for online cooperative games where participants arrive sequentially and the grand-coalition value must be shared immediately. It introduces three core participation axioms—PART, S-STAY, and IR—and demonstrates that existing online sharing rules fail these criteria, notably the early-arrival property. To fix this, it proposes MES, NDMES, ULMES, and eULMES, with IR refinements for superadditive valuations, and develops a GM decomposition framework to support decomposed, polynomial-time implementations. The work provides rigorous proofs (in appendices) of the axioms satisfied by these rules, analyzes limitations (notably EA failures for general valuations), and outlines open questions on achieving all desiderata simultaneously in poly-time. These contributions advance the theory and practice of online mechanism design for fair, incentive-compatible value distribution in dynamic coalition formation.
Abstract
This paper studies cooperative games where coalitions are formed online and the value generated by the grand coalition must be irrevocably distributed among the players at each timestep. We investigate the fundamental issue of strategic pariticipation incentives and address these concerns by formalizing natural participation incentive axioms. Our analysis reveals that existing value-sharing mechanisms fail to meet these criteria. Consequently, we propose several new mechanisms that not only fulfill these desirable participation incentive axioms but also satisfy the early arrival incentive for general valuation functions. Additionally, we refine our mechanisms under superadditive valuations to ensure individual rationality while preserving the previously established axioms.