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Rendezvous Search with Revealed Information: Applications to the Line

Part of: Operations research and management science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 July 2016

Steve Alpern
Steve Alpern*
Affiliation:
London School of Economics
*
∗ Postal address: Department of Mathematics, London School of Economics, London WC2A 2AE, UK. Email address: s.alpern@lse.ac.uk
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Abstract

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The symmetric rendezvous problem on a network Q asks how two players, forced to use the same mixed strategy, can minimize their expected meeting time, starting from a known initial distribution on the nodes of Q. This minimum is called the (symmetric) ‘rendezvous value’ of Q. Traditionally, the players are assumed to receive no information while playing the game. We consider the effect on rendezvous times of giving the players some information about past actions and chance moves, enabling each of them to apply Bayesian updates to improve his knowledge of the other's whereabouts. This technique can be used to give lower bounds on the rendezvous times of the original game (without any revealed information). We consider the case in which they are placed a known distance apart on the line graph Q (known as ‘symmetric rendezvous on the line’). Our approach is to concentrate on a general analysis of the effect of revelations, rather than compute the best bounds possible with our technique.

Keywords

Rendezvoussearchcommon interest gameteam theory

MSC classification

Primary: 90B40: Search theory
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Applied Probability , Volume 44 , Issue 1 , March 2007 , pp. 1 - 15
Copyright
Copyright © Applied Probability Trust 2007 

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