On imperfect pricing in globally constrained noncooperative games for cognitive radio networks

•We analyze the pricing mechanism for monotone NEPs with global constraints.•We consider uncertainty of pricing functions in the pricing mechanism.•We theoretically analyze the impacts of bounded uncertainty.•The imperfect pricing framework is applied to cognitive radio networks.

Pricing is often used in noncooperative games or Nash equilibrium problems (NEPs) to meet global constraints in cognitive radio networks. In this paper, we analyze the pricing mechanism for a class of solvable NEPs with global constraints, called monotone NEPs. In contrast to the ideal assumption of perfect measure of pricing functions, in practice pricing functions are often imperfectly known and subject to uncertainty. We theoretically analyze the impacts of bounded uncertainty and price-updating step sizes of imperfect pricing in globally constrained NEPs for cognitive radio networks.