This paper proposes a cooperative game-theoretic framework for sustainable co-investment in shared infrastructure under regulatory incentives. Multiple heterogeneous operators co-invest in a common infrastructure whose production capability evolves over time and is subject to operational variability. A regulator supports the deployment through incentive mechanisms designed to align individual economic investment objectives with the coalitional one. We formulate the co-investment problem as a transferable-utility (TU) coalitional game in which the value generated by cooperation depends on heterogeneous operational profiles, dynamic resource availability, investment costs, and regulatory incentive level. We show that the proposed coalitional game can be reformulated as a linear production game (LPG), whose dual prices yield a constructive and stable allocation of the cooperative surplus. Finally, we illustrate the proposed framework through a case study on co-investment among data center operators in shared renewable energy infrastructure, supported by government subsidies promoting renewable energy consumption.
This paper examines two interconnected challenges in Renewable Energy Communities (REC) optimization: investment in renewable technologies and equitable sharing of incentives, usually offered by a central authority. Focusing on a REC under the so-called
virtual framework
and composed of a household and a biogas producer — common in rural and urban contexts — we analyze how investment decisions and incentive-sharing mechanisms impact community profitability and self-consumption. The household invests in photovoltaic panels to reduce energy purchases and monetize surplus generation, while the biogas producer either converts biogas into electricity or sells it on the gas market. We model this interaction as a leader-follower problem: an administrator (leader) defines the incentive-sharing rule, while a household and a biogas producer (followers) determine their optimal investments. Modeling the objective of the leader as a Nash bargaining problem and a Nash equilibrium for the followers’ static game, we provide model-based insights into efficient REC design and policy implications for fostering sustainable community energy systems. The model is applied to this stylized case of a REC, under realistic data about the random variables and investment costs. We obtain structural insights into how specific incentive policies and members’ investment decisions interact within this specialized configuration, highlighting trade-offs that can guide the strategic organization of similar community energy frameworks.
A. Awerkin, P. Falbo, Tiziano Vargiolu· Annals of Operations Researc...· 1 citation
This study develops a cooperative game-theoretic framework for financing global public goods in an economy with asymmetric member states and applies it to the case of United Nations funding. The analysis examines whether a personalized-pricing contribution structure can improve upon an empirically grounded non-cooperative benchmark derived from observed member-state contribution patterns. Moving from a Nash-equilibrium benchmark in which states act primarily in self-interest to a cooperative model, the proposed approach aligns each country’s financial contributions with the benefits it derives from United Nations activities. Using agent-based simulations calibrated to United Nations contribution data, this paper compares the benchmark allocation with the cooperative Trading equilibrium and shows that the proposed framework increases global utility, reduces free riding, and improves the efficiency of resource allocation. The findings suggest that this framework can serve as a normative benchmark for a more equitable financing arrangement for global public goods in the United Nations context. Further research is needed to evaluate the institutional and political feasibility of implementing such a model in practice.
This paper examines how environmental regulation shapes pricing, capacity allocation, and infrastructure investment in the competitive Content Delivery Network (CDN) market. We develop a hierarchical game-theoretic framework modeling strategic interactions among multiple CDNs, a service provider, and end-users, capturing both economic and environmental objectives. Using backward induction, we analyze equilibrium behavior under two regulatory regimes–a baseline scenario without intervention and a regulated scenario, where CDNs incur taxes proportional to dirty capacity usage. Our analysis yields four principal findings. First, a structural tax threshold τ*, governed by the gap between renewable and fossil-fuel energy costs, determines the transition from carbon-intensive to clean infrastructure. Second, a moderate tax slightly above τ* achieves near-complete clean adoption at a total welfare loss of only 6.5 %. Third, government revenue is non-monotonic in the tax rate, peaking at low levels and collapsing as CDNs shift to untaxed clean capacity. Fourth, since the infrastructure-transition threshold is governed by the energy-cost gap of each provider, a uniform carbon tax imposes asymmetric burdens once these costs are heterogeneous across CDNs, motivating tiered tax designs. These results provide insights for policymakers seeking to align sustainability objectives with competitive dynamics in the content delivery market.
Burak Kara, Gwendal Simon, Bruno Tuffin· ACM Transactions on Modeling...· 0 citations
Dynamic coordination between regulatory authorities and industrial enterprises is essential for achieving sustainable manufacturing and intelligent environmental governance. This study develops an incentive-compatible differential game framework to investigate the collaborative optimization of local government regulation and enterprise emission reduction under dynamic pollution evolution. By incorporating pollution stock as the state variable and regulatory intensity together with enterprise abatement effort as control variables, a feedback Nash equilibrium and a cooperative Pareto-optimal strategy are systematically derived. A state-dependent dynamic transfer payment mechanism is further designed to guarantee incentive compatibility while preserving individual rationality, enabling both participants to converge toward cooperative decision-making through recursive feedback optimization. Numerical simulations demonstrate that the proposed mechanism significantly reduces long-term pollution accumulation, improves social welfare, and stabilizes the dynamic equilibrium under varying initial conditions. The framework establishes an effective dynamic control paradigm for intelligent environmental governance and provides valuable methodological references for distributed decision-making, networked optimization, and adaptive feedback systems in modern engineering applications, including digital industrial infrastructures and large-scale cyber-physical systems.
N. Kang, T. Hong· Advanced Electromagnetics· 0 citations
This paper investigates the dynamic coopetition and capacity-sharing strategies between an Integrated Manufacturer and a Developer under R&D uncertainty, focusing on the governance of strategically scarce capacity. By constructing a two-stage game model, we analyze how government intervention and risk-hedging mechanisms influence the allocation of idle strategically scarce capacity in innovation-driven industries. The findings reveal a two-sided paradoxical behavioral pattern: in the low-probability R&D interval, rather than relying on safe contract manufacturing, the Integrated Manufacturer counter-intuitively reduces collaborative duration to aggressively gamble on its immature product. Conversely, in the high-probability R&D interval, where conventional wisdom predicts an aggressive pivot to self-production, the manufacturer paradoxically extends or maintains the contract manufacturing duration, driven by the partner’s full cost-sharing incentive mechanism. Furthermore, To maximize the total supply output of strategically scarce resources during collaboration, we uncover a non-linear ‘counterproductive subsidy trap’ and propose a binary ‘critical mass’ policy rule: governments should either withhold subsidies entirely or commit sufficient funding to bypass the supply deficit zone. This framework provides a theoretical foundation for managing scarcity in capital-intensive sectors such as biopharmaceuticals and semiconductors.
Allocating scarce budgetary resources across the strategic objectives of the balanced scorecard (BSC) and the sustainability balanced scorecard (SBSC) is a central problem in sustainability-oriented strategic management. Existing approaches typically operate at the level of aggregated perspectives, rely on subjective weighting schemes, or ignore the causal structure of the strategy map. This article formalizes the problem as a cooperative game in which each strategic objective is a player and the value of every coalition combines the individual performance of its members with the synergies arising from the causal relationships of the strategy map, estimated through the decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (DEMATEL). The Shapley value is adopted as the allocation rule. The resulting game is shown to be superadditive and convex, the Shapley value belongs to the Core, and the rule satisfies exhaustiveness, fairness, sensitivity to the strategy map, monotonicity, and convergence to the proportional rule. Computational experiments and sensitivity analyses support the robustness of the model. In an illustrative case—a sustainability balanced scorecard with ten objectives organized in five perspectives, whose dedicated sustainability perspective hosts a carbon-emission and an employee-safety objective, and a budget of USD 1M—the framework shifts 2.7% of the total budget relative to a proportional allocation (individual objectives change by up to 12.3%), funds employee safety above financial cost reduction for any synergy weight γ≥0.15, keeps the combined share of the sustainability objectives stable within 0.6 percentage points across the entire synergy range, and grants seed funding to sustainability objectives that enter the map without a measured baseline, providing a transparent and auditable basis for sustainable budget allocation.
Mathias Yaksic, L. Quezada, Jorge Zamorano· Sustainability· 0 citations