Background
For my master's thesis in Applied Mathematics, I am looking for ways to apply game theory to problems related to the so-called "Smart Grid". I have found many papers in which all involved agents (that control energy management systems of, for instance, households) either all cooperate (see [1], [2], [3], and [4]) within the framework of cooperative game theory, or they all compete (see [5], [6], and [7]) within the framework of non-cooperative game theory, with one another.
However, I haven't seen any papers or books (yet) that deal with the setting in which individual agents can join either team A or team B (not both), and these teams compete with one another. So the agents within the teams cooperate with each other (in the context of smart grids, this can mean they share their surplus energy for free or a cheap price with their team members) while they coordinate together how they can harm all agents from the other team as much as possible.
I thought such a setting could be plausible because a utility/retail company X might want their customers the cooperate with one another, while they might want them to compete with customers from another utility/retail company Y. So the companies X and Y compete via their customers.
Questions
- Is the setting I described, in which the utility companies compete via their customers, realistic in a sense that it could be a future scenario?
- Has any research been done in which game-theoretic methods are used to model the setting I described (in individuals within teams collaborate, but coordinate to compete as good as possible against other teams) ? Could you point me to any articles/papers or books?
- Which research areas, besides cooperative and non-cooperative game theory, that are particularly relevant to the team-setting I described above?
Sources
[1] Nishantha Ekneligoda and Wayne W. Weaver, "Game-Theoretic Communication Structures in Microgrids", IEEE Transactions on Power Delivery, 2012
[2] Adriana Chris and Visa Koivunen, "Coalitional game based optimization of energy portfolio in smart grid communities", preprint, 2017
[3] Valentin Robu, Ramachandra Kota, Georgios Chalkiadakis, Alex Rogers, Nicholas R. Jennings, "Cooperative Virtual Power Plant Formation Using Scoring Rules", Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth AAAI Conference on Artifical Intelligence, 2012
[4] Meritxell Vinyals, Valentin Robu, Alex Rogers and Nicholas R. Jennings "Prediction-of-Use Games: a Cooperative Game Theory Approach to Sustainable Energy Tariffs", Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, 2014
[5] S. Rasoul Etesami, Walid Saad, Narayan Mandayam, and H. Vincent Poor "Stochastic Games for Smart Grid Energy Management with Prospect Prosumers", preprint, 2017
[6] Sarvapali D. Ramchurn, Perukrishnen Vytelingum, Alex Rogers, and Nick Jennings "Agent-Based Control for Decentralised Demand Side Management in the Smart Grid", International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, 2011
[7] Amir-Hamed Mohsenian-Rad, Vincent W. S. Wong, Juri Jatskevich, Robert Schober, and Alberto Leon-Garcia,"Autonomous Demand Side Management based on Game-Theoretic Energy Consumption Scheduling for the Future Smart Grid, IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid, 2010
PS I also asked this question on the electrical engineering stackexchange page.