Computer
Lottery trees: motivational deployment of networked systems
Proceedings of the 2007 conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communications
Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business
Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business
STACS'99 Proceedings of the 16th annual conference on Theoretical aspects of computer science
Proceedings of the twenty-second annual ACM symposium on Parallelism in algorithms and architectures
Finding red balloons with split contracts: robustness to individuals' selfishness
STOC '12 Proceedings of the forty-fourth annual ACM symposium on Theory of computing
Proceedings of the 13th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce
Hi-index | 0.00 |
In this paper we propose a game-theoretic model to analyze events similar to the 2009 DARPA Network Challenge, which was organized by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) for exploring the roles that the Internet and social networks play in incentivizing wide-area collaborations. The challenge was to form a group that would be the first to find the locations of ten moored weather balloons across the United States. We consider a model in which N people (who can form groups) are located in some topology with a fixed coverage volume around each person's geographical location. We consider various topologies where the players can be located such as the Euclidean d-dimension space and the vertices of a graph. A balloon is placed in the space and a group wins if it is the first one to report the location of the balloon. A larger team has a higher probability of finding the balloon, but we assume that the prize money is divided equally among the team members. Hence there is a competing tension to keep teams as small as possible. Risk aversion is the reluctance of a person to accept a bargain with an uncertain payoff rather than another bargain with a more certain, but possibly lower, expected payoff. In our model we consider the isoelastic utility function derived from the Arrow-Pratt measure of relative risk aversion. The main aim is to analyze the structures of the groups in Nash equilibria for our model. For the d-dimensional Euclidean space (d ≥ 1) and the class of bounded degree regular graphs we show that in any Nash Equilibrium the richestgroup (having maximum expected utility per person) covers a constant fraction of the total volume. The objective of events like the DARPA Network Challenge is to mobilize a large number of people quickly so that they can cover a big fraction of the total area. Our results suggest that this objective can be met under certain conditions.