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  University of Southern California



Towards Optimal Patrol Strategies for Fare Inspection in Transit Systems

AAAI Conferences

In some urban transit systems, passengers are legally required to purchase tickets before entering but are not physically forced to do so. Instead, patrol units move about through the transit system, inspecting tickets of passengers, who face fines for fare evasion. This setting yields the problem of computing optimal patrol strategies satisfying certain temporal and spacial constraints, to deter fare evasion and hence maximize revenue. In this paper we propose an initial model of this problem as a leader-follower Stackelberg game. We then formulate an LP relaxation of this problem and present initial experimental results using real-world ridership data from the Los Angeles Metro Rail system.


The Challenge of Flexible Intelligence for Models of Human Behavior

AAAI Conferences

Game theoretic predictions about equilibrium behavior depend upon assumptions of inflexibility of belief, of accord between belief and choice, and of choice across situations that share a game-theoretic structure. However, researchers rarely possess any knowledge of the actual beliefs of subjects, and rarely compare how a subject behaves in settings that share game-theoretic structure but that differ in other respects. Our within-subject experiments utilize a belief elicitation mechanism, roughly similar to a prediction market, in a laboratory setting to identify subjects’ beliefs about other subjects’ choices and beliefs. These experiments additionally allow us to compare choices in different settings that have similar game-theoretic structure. We find first, as have others,that subjects’ choices in the Trust and related games are significantly different from the strategies that derive from subgame perfect Nash equilibrium principles. We show that, for individual subjects, there is considerable flexibility of choice and belief across similar tasks and that the relationship between belief and choice is similarly flexible. To improve our ability to predict human behavior, we must take account of the flexible nature of human belief and choice


Addressing Execution and Observation Error in Security Games

AAAI Conferences

Attacker-defender Stackelberg games have become a popular game-theoretic approach for security with deployments for LAX Police, the FAMS and the TSA. Unfortunately, most of the existing solution approaches do not model two key uncertainties of the real-world: there may be noise in the defender’s execution of the suggested mixed strategy and/or the observations made by an attacker can be noisy. In this paper, we analyze a framework to model these uncertainties, and demonstrate that previous strategies perform poorly in such uncertain settings. We also analyze RECON, a novel algorithm that computes strategies for the defender that are robust to such uncertainties, and explore heuristics that further improve RECON’s efficiency.