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To understand the impact of competition on organizational service reliability decisions, this study investigates whether firms in the airline industry consider competitors' actions when making their service reliability decisions. Using data from the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics on flight cancellation rates and average length of flight delays, the authors use two complementary approaches, a simultaneous equation model and a discrete game framework, to examine competitive influence on firm decisions on the level of service reliability. The authors find that competitive effects are asymmetric and differ by the type of firm and its competitors—full-service versus low-cost airlines—as well by level of market concentration. The authors show that internal initiatives, such as on-time bonuses, can substantially improve service reliability but require the firm to account for competitive reactions. Ignoring competitive effects leads to an overestimation of the impact of these programs on service reliability levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a two-stage model to consider a franchise/franchisee environment in which supply chains are simultaneously entering the untapped market to produce either identical or highly substitutable products and give franchise to franchisees. Customer demand is elastic, price dependent and customer utility function is based on Huff gravity rule model. The supply chains, in the first stage, shape their networks and set the market prices based on dynamic games. The franchisees, in the second stage, specify their attractiveness levels and set the locations of their retailers in simultaneous games. Possibility theory was also applied to cope with uncertainty. Finally, we applied our model to a real world problem, discussed the results, conducted some sensitivity analyses, and gained some managerial insights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To preserve continued effective performance of facilities, their protection against intentional attacks needs to be considered while determining optimal facility location solutions. We propose a simultaneous game between a defender and an attacker to study facility protection against intentional attacks while keeping the information about protection resource allocation secret. To deal with the complexity of solving the proposed simultaneous game, we employ an algorithm with necessary adaptations to identify its mixed-strategy Nash equilibrium solution, which is used to evaluate the disruption inflicted by intentional attacks on the efficiency of a facility location solution. The facility location problem with protection against intentional attacks is then modeled as a multi-objective optimization problem, in order to balance the cost of opening facilities and the efficiency of facilities with and without facility failures inflicted by intentional attacks. MO-PSDA, a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm, is employed to solve the proposed multi-objective optimization problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We prove that the combinatorial side of the “Rational Shuffle Conjecture” provides a Schur-positive symmetric polynomial. Furthermore, we prove that the contribution of a given rational Dyck path can be computed as a certain skew LLT polynomial, thus generalizing the result of Haglund, Haiman, Loehr, Remmel and Ulyanov. The corresponding skew diagram is described explicitly in terms of a certain ( m , n ) -core. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The operation of cyber infrastructures relies on both cyber and physical components, which are subject to incidental and intentional degradations of different kinds. Within the context of network and computing infrastructures, we study the strategic interactions between an attacker and a defender using game-theoretic models that take into account both cyber and physical components. The attacker and defender optimize their individual utilities, expressed as sums of cost and system terms. First, we consider a Boolean attack-defense model, wherein the cyber and physical subinfrastructures may be attacked and reinforced as individual units. Second, we consider a component attack-defense model wherein their components may be attacked and defended, and the infrastructure requires minimum numbers of both to function. We show that the Nash equilibrium under uniform costs in both cases is computable in polynomial time, and it provides high-level deterministic conditions for the infrastructure survival. When probabilities of successful attack and defense, and of incidental failures, are incorporated into the models, the results favor the attacker but otherwise remain qualitatively similar. This approach has been motivated and validated by our experiences with UltraScience Net infrastructure, which was built to support high-performance network experiments. The analytical results, however, are more general, and we apply them to simplified models of cloud and high-performance computing infrastructures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adversarial risk analysis has been introduced as a framework to deal with risks derived from intentional actions of adversaries. The analysis supports one of the decisionmakers, who must forecast the actions of the other agents. Typically, this forecast must take account of random consequences resulting from the set of selected actions. The solution requires one to model the behavior of the opponents, which entails strategic thinking. The supported agent may face different kinds of opponents, who may use different rationality paradigms, for example, the opponent may behave randomly, or seek a Nash equilibrium, or perform level- k thinking, or use mirroring, or employ prospect theory, among many other possibilities. We describe the appropriate analysis for these situations, and also show how to model the uncertainty about the rationality paradigm used by the opponent through a Bayesian model averaging approach, enabling a fully decision-theoretic solution. We also show how as we observe an opponent's decision behavior, this approach allows learning about the validity of each of the rationality models used to predict his decision by computing the models' (posterior) probabilities, which can be understood as a measure of their validity. We focus on simultaneous decision making by two agents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we present a method for the synthesis of a delayed anti-windup scheme in which the anti-windup compensator is activated only when the degree of saturation reaches a certain level. Unlike the traditional two-step anti-windup design procedure, our method synthesizes entire parameters of the nominal controller and the delayed anti-windup compensator simultaneously. In this simultaneous design, the trade-offs between the linear and the constrained closed-loop response are carried out, for the anti-windup compensator retrofits to the 'existing' nominal controller. Sufficient conditions for guaranteeing global stability and minimizing the induced [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Forming coalitions is a generic means for cooperation: people, robots, web services, resources, firms; they can all improve their performance by joining forces. The use of coalitions has been successful in domains such as task allocations, sensor networks, and electronic marketplaces. Forming efficient coalitions requires the identification of matching synergies between different entities (finding complementary partners, or similar partners, or partners who add diversity). In addition, the different parties must negotiate a fair repartition of the worth created by the coalition. The first part of this paper is a tutorial on cooperative game theory (also called coalitional games). We then survey the different scenarios and the key issues addressed by the multiagent systems community. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We study two-player contests in which each player hires a delegate, and the delegates decide endogenously when to expend their effort. First, we look closely at the delegates' decisions on when to expend their effort, given contracts between the players and the delegates, and look at the players' decisions on their contracts. Then, we compare the outcomes of the endogenous-timing framework with those of the simultaneous-move framework. We show that the higher-valuation player offers her delegate greater contingent compensation than her opponent, the delegate of the higher-valuation player chooses his effort level after observing his counterpart's, the equilibrium expected payoff of the delegate of the higher-valuation player is greater than that of his counterpart, and economic rent for each delegate exists. We show that, in the endogenous-timing framework, each player offers her delegate better contingent compensation, each delegate's expected payoff is greater, and each player's expected payoff is smaller, as compared with the simultaneous-move framework. (JEL D72 ) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a method for finding a Nash equilibrium of two-person games with alternating offers. The proposed method is referred to as the inexact proximal alternating direction method. In this method, the idea of alternating direction method simulates alternating offers in the game, while the inexact solutions of subproblems can be matched to the assumptions of incomplete information and bounded individual rationality in practice. The convergence of the proposed method is proved under some suitable conditions. Numerical tests show that the proposed method is competitive to the state-of-the-art algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents an example which suggests that an additional assumption is needed before one can infer that the Nash equilibrium to a symmetric simultaneous-move two-player contest is identical to the subgame-perfect equilibrium of the corresponding sequential-move contest in which the strategy space is restricted to a neighborhood of the simultaneous-move equilibrium.

The article discusses a study that provides Game Theoretic Analysis of the Turkish Automobile Industry from 1990-1998. Topics discussed include use of structural econometric approach to evaluate the behavior of the two market leaders in the Turkish automobile industry, components of non-cooperative market games such as simultaneous move game and sequential move games and good interactions between automakers, Renault and Tofas.