English

Strategic Arms with Side Communication Prevail Over Low-Regret MAB Algorithms

Artificial Intelligence 2024-09-02 v1

Abstract

In the strategic multi-armed bandit setting, when arms possess perfect information about the player's behavior, they can establish an equilibrium where: 1. they retain almost all of their value, 2. they leave the player with a substantial (linear) regret. This study illustrates that, even if complete information is not publicly available to all arms but is shared among them, it is possible to achieve a similar equilibrium. The primary challenge lies in designing a communication protocol that incentivizes the arms to communicate truthfully.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2408.17101,
  title  = {Strategic Arms with Side Communication Prevail Over Low-Regret MAB Algorithms},
  author = {Ahmed Ben Yahmed and Clément Calauzènes and Vianney Perchet},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2408.17101},
  year   = {2024}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T18:28:32.633Z