Abstract
Recent work studied Stackelberg security games with multiple defenders, in which heterogeneous defenders allocate security resources to protect a set of targets against a strategic attacker. Equilibrium analysis was conducted to characterize outcomes of these games when defenders act independently. Our starting point is the observation that the use of resources in equilibria may be inefficient due to lack of coordination. We explore the possibility of reducing this inefficiency by coordinating the defenders-specifically, by pooling the defenders' resources and allocating them jointly. The defenders' heterogeneous preferences then give rise to a collective decision-making problem, which calls for a mechanism to generate joint allocation strategies. We seek a mechanism that encourages coordination, produces efficiency gains, and incentivizes the defenders to report their true preferences and to execute the recommended strategies. Our results show that, unfortunately, even these basic properties clash with each other and no mechanism can achieve them simultaneously, which reveals the intrinsic difficulty of achieving meaningful defense coordination in security games. On the positive side, we put forward mechanisms that fulfill some of these properties and we identify special cases of our setting where more of these properties are compatible.
Original language | English |
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Title of host publication | Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, AAMAS 2020 |
Editors | Bo An, Amal El Fallah Seghrouchni, Gita Sukthankar |
Publisher | International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (IFAAMAS) |
Pages | 402-410 |
Number of pages | 9 |
ISBN (Electronic) | 9781450375184 |
State | Published - 2020 |
Event | 19th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, AAMAS 2020 - Virtual, Auckland, New Zealand Duration: 19 May 2020 → … |
Publication series
Name | Proceedings of the International Joint Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, AAMAS |
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Volume | 2020-May |
ISSN (Print) | 1548-8403 |
ISSN (Electronic) | 1558-2914 |
Conference
Conference | 19th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, AAMAS 2020 |
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Country/Territory | New Zealand |
City | Virtual, Auckland |
Period | 19/05/20 → … |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2020 International Foundation for Autonomous.
Funding
This work was supported by the European Research Council (ERC) under grant number 639945 (ACCORD). Jiarui Gan was supported by the EPSRC International Doctoral Scholars Grant EP/N509711/1. Sarit Kraus was partially supported by Ministry of Science and Technology, Israel and the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST), Japan.
Funders | Funder number |
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Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council | EP/N509711/1 |
European Commission | 639945 |
Japan Science and Technology Agency | |
Ministry of science and technology, Israel |
Keywords
- Coordination
- Mechanism design
- Stackelberg Security games