4th International ICST Workshop on Game Theory in Communication Networks

Research Article

The price of re-establishing perfect, almost perfect or public monitoring in games with arbitrary monitoring

  • @INPROCEEDINGS{10.4108/icst.valuetools.2011.245800,
        author={Mael LE TREUST and Samson LASAULCE},
        title={The price of re-establishing perfect, almost perfect or public monitoring in games with arbitrary monitoring},
        proceedings={4th International ICST Workshop on Game Theory in Communication Networks},
        publisher={ACM},
        proceedings_a={GAMECOMM},
        year={2012},
        month={6},
        keywords={repeated games monitoring structure information theory joint source-channel coding graph coloring},
        doi={10.4108/icst.valuetools.2011.245800}
    }
    
  • Mael LE TREUST
    Samson LASAULCE
    Year: 2012
    The price of re-establishing perfect, almost perfect or public monitoring in games with arbitrary monitoring
    GAMECOMM
    ICST
    DOI: 10.4108/icst.valuetools.2011.245800
Mael LE TREUST1,*, Samson LASAULCE1
  • 1: LSS - CNRS - SUPELEC - UNIVERSITE PARIS SUD 11
*Contact email: mael.letreust@lss.supelec.fr

Abstract

This paper establishes a connection between the notion of observation (or monitoring) structure in game theory and the one of communication channels in Shannon theory. One of the objectives is to know under which conditions an arbitrary monitoring structure can be transformed into a more pertinent monitoring structure. To this end, a mediator is added to the game. The objective of the mediator is to choose a signalling scheme that allows the players to have perfect, almost perfect or public monitoring and all of this, at a minimum cost in terms of signalling. Graph coloring, source coding, and channel coding are exploited to deal with these issues. A wireless power control game is used to illustrate these notions but the applicability of the provided results and, more importantly, the framework of transforming monitoring structures go much beyond this example.