Browsing by Subject "game theory"
Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
Results Per Page
Sort Options
Item Essays in game theory and institutions(2009-06-02) Rai, Birendra KumarThis dissertation is a compilation of essays highlighting the usefulness of game theory in understanding socio-economic phenomena. The second chapter tries to provide a reason for the strict codes of conduct that have been imposed on unmarried girls in almost every society at some point of time in its history using tools from classical game theory. If men prefer to marry submissive women, then parents of girls will have an incentive to signal the submissiveness of their daughters in various ways in order to attract better matches. At the same time, parents will find it costlier to signal the submissiveness of girls who are not really submissive. This line of reasoning thus helps us interpret phenomena such as veiling, footbinding, and sequestration of women in general as signals of submissiveness. The third chapter attempts to rationalize some of the ad hoc rules proposed for dividing a bankrupt estate using tools from evolutionary game theory. The ad hoc rules differ from each other because of the axioms that are imposed in addition to efficiency and claims boundedness. Efficiency requires that the estate be completely divided between the claimants, and claims boundedness requires that no claimant be awarded more than her initial contribution. This dissertation tries to show that an ad hoc rule can be rationalized as the unique self-enforcing long run outcome of Young's [46] evolutionary bargaining model by using certain intuitive rules for the Nash demand game. In the fourth chapter I present a simple model of conflict over inputs in an economy with ill-defined property rights. Agents produce output from the land they hold, which in turn can be allocated to consumption or the production of guns. There is no agency to enforce rights over the initial land holdings, and the future holdings of land are determined using a contest success function that depends on the guns produced by both agents. I characterize the equilibria in which only one, both, and none of the agents produce guns, as a function of the total land and the inequality of initial land holdings for general forms of utility, production, cost, and contest success functions.Item Stealthy attacks and defense strategies in competing sensor networks(2009-05-15) Czarlinska, AleksandraThe fundamental objective of sensor networks underpinning a variety of applications is the collection of reliable information from the surrounding environment. The correctness of the collected data is especially important in applications involving societal welfare and safety, in which the acquired information may be utilized by end-users for decision-making. The distributed nature of sensor networks and their deployment in unattended and potentially hostile environments, however, renders this collection task challenging for both scalar and visual data. In this work we propose and address the twin problem of carrying out and defending against a stealthy attack on the information gathered by a sensor network at the physical sensing layer as perpetrated by a competing hostile network. A stealthy attack in this context is an intelligent attempt to disinform a sensor network in a manner that mitigates attack discovery. In comparison with previous sensor network security studies, we explicitly model the attack scenario as an active competition between two networks where difficulties arise from the pervasive nature of the attack, the possibility of tampering during data acquisition prior to encryption, and the lack of prior knowledge regarding the characteristics of the attack. We examine the problem from the perspective of both the hostile and the legitimate network. The interaction between the networks is modeled as a game where a stealth utility is derived and shown to be consistent for both players in the case of stealthy direct attacks and stealthy cross attacks. Based on the stealth utility, the optimal attack and defense strategies are obtained for each network. For the legitimate network, minimization of the attacker?s stealth results in the possibility of attack detection through established paradigms and the ability to mitigate the power of the attack. For the hostile network, maximization of the stealth utility translates into the optimal attack avoidance. This attack avoidance does not require active communication among the hostile nodes but rather relies on a level of coordination which we quantify. We demonstrate the significance and effectiveness of the solution for sensor networks acquiring scalar and multidimensional data such as surveillance sequences and relate the results to existing image sensor networks. Finally we discuss the implications of these results for achieving secure event acquisition in unattended environments.Item Wireless Network Coding: Analysis, Control Mechanisms, and Incentive Design(2014-05-08) Hsu, Yu-PinThe access to information anywhere and anytime is becoming a necessity in our daily life. Wireless technologies are expected to provide ubiquitous access to information and to support a broad range of emerging applications, such as multimedia streaming and video conferencing. The need to support the explosive growth in wireless traffic requires new tools and techniques that maximize the spectrum efficiency, as well as minimize delays and power consumption. This dissertation aims at novel approaches for the design and analysis of efficient and reliable wireless networks. We plan to propose efficient solutions that leverage user collaboration, peer-to-peer data exchange, and the novel technique of network coding. Network coding improves the performance of wireless networks by exploiting the broadcast nature of the wireless spectrum. The new techniques, however, pose significant challenges in terms of control, scheduling, and mechanism design. The proposed research will address these challenges by developing novel network controllers, packet schedulers, and incentive mechanisms that would encourage the clients to collaborate and contribute resources to the information transfer. Our contributions can be broadly divided into three research thrusts: (1) stochastic network coding; (2) incentive mechanism design; (3) joint coding and scheduling design. In the first thrust we consider a single-relay network and propose an optimal controller for the stochastic setting as well as a universal controller for the on-line setting. We prove that there exist an optimal controller for the stochastic setting which is stationary, deterministic, and threshold type based on the queue length. For the on-line setting we present a randomized algorithm with the competitive ratio of e/(e-1). In the second thrust, we propose incentive mechanisms for both centralized and distributed settings. In the third thrust, we propose joint coding and scheduling algorithms for time-varying wireless networks. The outcomes of our research have both theoretical and practical impact. We design and validate efficient algorithms, as well as provide insights on the fundamental properties of wireless networks. We believe these results are valuable for the industry as they are instrumental for the design and analysis of future wireless and cellular networks that are more efficient and robust.