The Price of Spite in Spot-checking games

• We introduce the class of spot-checking games (SC games). These games model problems where the goal is to distribute fare inspectors over a toll network. Although SC games are not zero-sum, we show that a Nash equilibrium can be computed by linear programming. The computation of a strong Stackelberg equilibrium is more relevant for this problem, but we show that this is NP-hard. However, we give some bounds on the \emph{price of spite}, which measures how the payoff of the inspector degrades when committing to a Nash equilibrium. Finally, we demonstrate the quality of these bounds for a real-world application, namely the enforcement of a truck toll on German motorways.

Author: Guillaume Sagnol, Ralf Borndörfer, Thomas Schlechte, Elmar Swarat Ron Lavi In Proceedings 7th International Symposium on Algorithmic Game Theory (SAGT'2014) 8768 293 Lecture Notes in Computer Science Springer 2014 1 978-3-662-44802-1 Brief Announcement included in Back Matter p. 293 following urn:nbn:de:0297-zib-52775 http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-44803-8
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