Dual payoffs, core and a collaboration mechanism based on capacity exchange prices in multicommodity flow games

Abstract

Given a network in which the edge capacities and the commodities are owned by the players, a cooperative multicommodity flow (MCF) game (N,v) can be defined such that v(S), the value of a sub-coalition S, is the maximum profit achievable within S by shipping its commodities through the sub-network owned by its members. In this paper, we study MCF games under a partially decentralized setting where the players make their own routing and resource exchange decisions given a set of capacity prices determined by a central authority. © 2008 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.