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We study novel variations of Voronoi games (and associated random processes) that we call Voronoi choice games. These games provide a rich framework for studying questions regarding the power of small numbers of choices in multi-player, competitive scenarios in a geometric setting. Our work can be seen as a natural variation of the classical framework of Hotelling. While games based on Voronoi diagrams have appeared recently in the literature, our variations appear to be the first that take into account a notion of limited choices and the corresponding asymmetries in player strategies. As a problem example, suppose a group of n miners (or players) are staking land claims through the following process: each miner has m associated points in the unit square (or, for symmetry, the unit torus), so the kth miner will have associated points pk1, pk2, . . . , pkm. We generally here think of m as being a small constant, such as 2. Each miner chooses one of these points as the base point for their claim. Generally the points will be distinct for each miner. Each miner obtains mining rights for the area of the square that is closest to their chosen base; that is, they obtain the Voronoi cell corresponding to their chosen point in the Voronoi diagram of the n chosen points. Each player’s goal is simply to maximize the amount of land under their control. What can we say about the players’ strategy and the equilibria of such games? We provide several results on games in this setting. For example, we show that a correlated equilibrium can be found in polynomial time for the natural 1, 2, and 3-dimensional variations of the problem. For the one-dimensional version of the problem on the unit circle, we show that a pure Nash equilibrium exists when each player owns the part of the circle nearest to their point, but it is NP-hard to determine whether a pure Nash equilibrium exists when each player owns the arc starting from their point clockwise to the next point. We also consider a random version of the game, where players have m points chosen uniformly at random. We derive bounds on the expected number of pure Nash equilibria for a variation of the 1-dimensional game in this setting using interesting properties of random arc lengths on circles.

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