Cost Allocation in Common Facilities Sharing

Briata, F. and Fragnelli, V. [2017] Free-riding in common facility sharing, in Transaction on Computation Collective Intelligence XXVII, pp. 129–138. dealt with the inefficiency and the free-riding situations that may arise from sharing the maintenance cost of a facility among its potential users and from dividing the cost of a check to assess who the users are among the agents that asked for it.They introduced two mechanisms for reducing the free-riding behaviors and considered the possibility that the check provides also information on the level at which the facility is used by each agent. In this paper, we improve the profitability of the check, introducing a TU-cost game for determining the quota of the total cost assigned to each agent in order to satisfy as many agents as possible. Two solutions are proposed and analyzed and the balancedness of the TU-cost game is studied and characterized.

Consumers' Involvement on (Re)Engineering Store Design

The emerging need to make more attractive physical stores for catching new clients and maintaining the existing ones pushes retailers to develop efficient practices for acquiring knowledge from consumers and involving them in the points of sales' design. The final users' needs and preferences are considered a core in design process. This chapter proposes a system for involving consumers in the store design process through an innovative cloud participatory platform. It is a low cost hardware/software architecture offering a user-friendly interface able to be adopted by audiences with different background. Results show the consumers' interest to contribute in the design by using such technologies and providing a large amount of detailed information useful for future appealing stores' development. Finally, this chapter shows how the inclusion of modern low-cost game technologies in retail industry might provide ripper effects in several disciplines such as human-computer interaction, marketing, and management.

Data Cost Games as an Application of 1-Concavity in Cooperative Game Theory

The main goal is to reveal the 1-concavity property for a subclass of cost games called data cost games. The motivation for the study of the 1-concavity property is the appealing theoretical results for both the core and the nucleolus, in particular their geometrical characterization as well as their additivity property. The characteristic cost function of the original data cost game assigns to every coalition the additive cost of reproducing the data the coalition does not own. The underlying data and cost sharing situation is composed of three components, namely, the player set, the collection of data sets for individuals, and the additive cost function on the whole data set. The proof of 1-concavity is direct, but robust to a suitable generalization of the characteristic cost function. As an adjunct, the 1-concavity property is shown for the subclass of so-called “bicycle” cost games, inclusive of the data cost games in which the individual data sets are nested in a decreasing order.

SOME EXCESS-BASED SOLUTIONS FOR COOPERATIVE GAMES WITH TRANSFERABLE UTILITY

For a finite player cooperative cost game, we consider two solutions that are based on excesses of coalitions. We define per-capita excess-sum of a player as sum of normalized excesses of coalitions involving this player and view it as a measure of player's dissatisfaction. So, per-capita excess-sum allocation is that imputation that minimizes the maximum per-capita excess-sums of players. We provide a closed form expression for an allocation, which is the per-capita excess-sum allocation if it is also individually rational. We propose a finite step algorithm to compute per-capita excess-sum allocation for a general game. We show that per-capita excess-sum allocation is coalitionally monotonic. Next, we consider excess-sum solution wherein a player views entire coalition's excess as a measure of dissatisfaction. This excess-sum solution also has above properties. In addition, we consider a super set of core and show that excess-sum allocation can be viewed as an imputation that is a certain center of this polyhedron. We introduce a class of cooperative games that can model cost sharing among divisions of a firm when they buy items at volume discounts. We characterize when excess-based allocations coincide with Shapley value, nucleolus, etc. in such games.