The Gaussian CEO competitive pricing game

In this paper, we formulate a non cooperative pricing game over the quadratic Gaussian CEO problem with two agents. The agents observe independently corrupted versions of a source process X which the CEO is interested in estimating within an average distortion D. The agents quote a price per unit rate to generate revenue. They also incur a cost for communicating at the required rate. Given the agent prices, the CEO chooses a rate pair which minimizes its total cost. For a class of CEO problems, we show that when agent costs are convex in their respective rates, the aforementioned pricing game has a unique pure strategy Nash equilibrium. For a special case when the agents incur no costs, we explicitly determine the unique Nash equilibrium.

[1]  Toby Berger,et al.  The quadratic Gaussian CEO problem , 1997, IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory.

[2]  Yasutada Oohama,et al.  Rate-distortion theory for Gaussian multiterminal source coding systems with several side informations at the decoder , 2005, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory.

[3]  Mokshay M. Madiman,et al.  Cores of Cooperative Games in Information Theory , 2008, EURASIP J. Wirel. Commun. Netw..

[4]  Vinod M. Prabhakaran,et al.  Rate region of the quadratic Gaussian CEO problem , 2004, International Symposium onInformation Theory, 2004. ISIT 2004. Proceedings..

[5]  X. Vives Oligopoly Pricing: Old Ideas and New Tools , 1999 .

[6]  Hesham El Gamal,et al.  The Water-Filling Game in Fading Multiple-Access Channels , 2005, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory.

[7]  J. Goodman Note on Existence and Uniqueness of Equilibrium Points for Concave N-Person Games , 1965 .

[8]  Tat-Ming Lok,et al.  Pricing Games for Distributed Cooperative Transmission , 2010, IEEE Transactions on Vehicular Technology.

[9]  Yasutada Oohama,et al.  The Rate-Distortion Function for the Quadratic Gaussian CEO Problem , 1998, IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory.

[10]  Ariel Rubinstein,et al.  A Course in Game Theory , 1995 .

[11]  Dusit Niyato,et al.  Competitive Pricing for Spectrum Sharing in Cognitive Radio Networks: Dynamic Game, Inefficiency of Nash Equilibrium, and Collusion , 2008, IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications.

[12]  Richard J. La,et al.  DIMACS Series in Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science A Game-theoretic Look at the Gaussian Multiaccess Channel , 2022 .