Strategic Cooperation in the Metaverse: A Game Theory Analysis with Age Of Information

The Metaverse is an immersive online world, accessed through headsets, seamlessly integrating virtual and augmented reality. Users navigate this digital realm through avatars, participating in real-time activities such as work, meetings, concerts. The real-time nature of the Metaverse prompts an analysis using age of information, a metric that tracks information freshness. In this environment, where users actively seek continuous stimuli, sustaining high attention is vital. We propose a game-theoretic analysis of user-server interactions for enduring cooperation, where we incorporate a discount factor to quantitatively compare present and future actions. We derive closed-form solutions for the infinite horizon game and obtain lower bounds for the discount factor chosen by the entities and upper bounds for the communication cost sustainable in order to achieve long-lasting cooperation. This enriches our understanding of temporal dynamics in ensuring information freshness, providing insight into the dynamic interplay between users and the Metaverse environment.