Competitive Multiagent Systems: Bridging the Gap between Theory and Practice

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Competitive multiagent systems are environments in which two or more self-interested agents interact. It is this ingredient of self-interest that makes a multiagent system ``competitive": agents' desires cannot be relied upon to coincide. Game theory is the dominant approach used to study such environments. Unfortunately, a significant gap still exists between theory and practice. For example, game-theoretic models are typically very small and are built on the assumptions that agents are omniscient (hold no false beliefs) and utility-maximizing (computationally-unbounded). Even if such an agent did exist, existing theories would not tell him how to reason about more limited competitors. Approaches to resource allocation usually assume that goods for sale cannot be resold and are unique (i.e., they are available only in the one-shot market being designed), that agents face no transaction costs or budgets, that markets can be redesigned without any constraints, and that agents know their valuations for the goods being allocated. In practical settings of interest, some or even all of these assumptions can fail to hold.