Reverse priority mechanisms in allocation of resources

The paper describes a problem of allocation of a limited resource under the conditions of probabilistic indeterminacy as related to the quantity of resource allocated. The active system consists of the Center and consumers (agents). The Center has a resource being allocated among the consumers based on their requests. When requests are announced, the consumers have information only on the function of allocation of resource being allocated by the Center. The priority mechanisms of resource allocation based on the reverse priority principle (the priority function is a decreasing request function) are studied for a deterministic case when the amount of resource available at the Center is known by the consumers as well as under the conditions of probabilistic indeterminacy. Nash Equilibria are determined for different priority functions provided the objective functions of consumers increase monotonically in relation to the resource quantity. A business game is proposed to study the mechanism of reverse priorities in resource allocation problems (deterministic and probabilistic cases). Informal and formal descriptions of games are included. Gaming algorithm is proposed. The results of experiments are presented for deterministic and probabilistic cases with different priority functions, which confirm the key theoretical conclusions.