Chevalier, Céline; Gaumont, Damien; Naccache, David; Do Canto, Rodrigo Portella How to (carefully) breach a service contract? (English) Zbl 1405.94052 Ryan, Peter Y. A. (ed.) et al., The new codebreakers. Essays dedicated to David Kahn on the occasion of his 85th birthday. Berlin: Springer (ISBN 978-3-662-49300-7/pbk; 978-3-662-49301-4/ebook). Lecture Notes in Computer Science 9100, 166-173 (2016). Summary: Consider a firm \(\mathcal {S}\) providing support to clients \(\mathcal {A}\) and \(\mathcal {B}\).The contract \(\mathcal {S} \leftrightarrow \mathcal {A}\) stipulates that \(\mathcal {S}\) must continuously serve \(\mathcal {A}\) and answer its calls immediately. While servicing \(\mathcal {A}\), \(\mathcal {S}\) incurs two costs: personnel fees (salaries) that \(\mathcal {A}\) refunds on a per-call-time basis and technical fees that are not refunded.The contract \(\mathcal {S} \leftrightarrow \mathcal {B}\) is a pay-per-call agreement where \(\mathcal {S}\) gets paid an amount proportional to \(\mathcal {B}\)’s incoming call’s duration. We consider that the flow of incoming \(\mathcal {B}\) calls is unlimited and regular.\(\mathcal {S}\) wishes to use his workforce for both tasks, switching from \(\mathcal {A}\) to \(\mathcal {B}\) if necessary. As \(\mathcal {S} \leftrightarrow \mathcal {B}\) generates new benefits and \(\mathcal {S} \leftrightarrow \mathcal {A}\) is the fulfilling of a contracted obligation, \(\mathcal {S}\) would like to devote as little resources as necessary to support \(\mathcal {A}\) and divert as much workforce as possible to serve \(\mathcal {B}\). Hence, \(\mathcal {S}\)’s goal is to minimize his availability to serve \(\mathcal {A}\) without incurring too high penalties.This paper models \(\mathcal {A}\) as a naïve player. This captures \(\mathcal {A}\)’s needs but not \(\mathcal {A}\)’s game-theoretic interests – which thorough investigation remains an open question.For the entire collection see [Zbl 1334.94030]. MSC: 94A60 Cryptography PDFBibTeX XMLCite \textit{C. Chevalier} et al., Lect. Notes Comput. Sci. 9100, 166--173 (2016; Zbl 1405.94052) Full Text: DOI