Incorporating Fairness into Infinitely Repeated Games with Conflicting Interests for Conflicts Elimination

In many multi-agent applications, game theory can serve as a useful tool to model these multi-agent scenarios and analyse the strategic interactions among agents. Fairness is an important goal to consider in a variety of multi-agent applications such as resource allocation or job scheduling problems, but it is not taken into consideration in traditional game theory. However, in many cases the solution concepts of pure strategy or mixed strategy Nash equilibria from traditional game theory can lead to unfair and inefficient outcomes. In this paper, we explicitly introduce the concept of fairness strategy in the context of infinitely repeated game inspired from fairness motive observed in human behaviors. We show that using fairness strategy, not only the agents can receive equal payoffs (achieving fairness) but also the sum of their payoffs is maximized (achieving efficiency) in the infinitely repeated games with conflicting interests. More importantly, we prove that this desirable pair of fairness strategies is in a new type of equilibrium - fairness strategy equilibrium, which thus provides an intuitive solution concept for the agents to make their decisions and coordinate with other agents or even humans.