A Stackelberg Game Model of Flocking

Abstract

We study a Stackelberg game to examine how two agents determine to cooperate while competing with each other. Each selects an arrival time to a destination, the earlier one fetching a higher reward. There is, however, an inherent penalty in arriving too early as well as a risk in traveling alone. This gives rise to the possibility of the agents cooperating by traveling together while competing for the reward. In our prior work [1] we studied this problem as a sequential game among a set of $N$ competing agents in continuous time, and defined the formation of a group traveling together as arriving at exactly the same time. In the present study, we relax this definition to allow arrival times within a small window, and study a 2-agent game in both continuous and discrete time, referred to as the flock formation game. We derive and examine the properties of the subgame perfect equilibrium (SPE) of this game.