Related papers: Optimizing Scrip Systems: Crashes, Altruists, Hoar…
We discuss the design of efficient scrip systems and develop tools for empirically analyzing them. For those interested in the empirical study of scrip systems, we demonstrate how characteristics of agents in a system can be inferred from…
A model of providing service in a P2P network is analyzed. It is shown that by adding a scrip system, a mechanism that admits a reasonable Nash equilibrium that reduces free riding can be obtained. The effect of varying the total amount of…
Game-theoretic analyses of distributed and peer-to-peer systems typically use the Nash equilibrium solution concept, but this explicitly excludes the possibility of strategic behavior involving more than one agent. We examine the effects of…
A game-theoretic model of scrip (artificial currency) systems is analyzed. It is shown that relative entropy can be used to characterize the distribution of agent wealth when all agents use threshold strategies---that is, they volunteer to…
When users access shared resources in a selfish manner, the resulting societal cost and perceived users' cost is often higher than what would result from a centrally coordinated optimal allocation. While several contributions in mechanism…
When people choose routes minimizing their individual delay, the aggregate congestion can be much higher compared to that experienced by a centrally-imposed routing. Yet centralized routing is incompatible with the presence of…
Mobility systems often suffer from a high price of anarchy due to the uncontrolled behavior of selfish users. This may result in societal costs that are significantly higher compared to what could be achieved by a centralized system-optimal…
Many real-world systems such as taxi systems, traffic networks and smart grids involve self-interested actors that perform individual tasks in a shared environment. However, in such systems, the self-interested behaviour of agents produces…
Congestion games are popular models often used to study the system-level inefficiencies caused by selfish agents, typically measured by the price of anarchy. One may expect that aligning the agents' preferences with the system-level…
Recent years have seen a surge of artificial currency-based mechanisms in contexts where monetary instruments are deemed unfair or inappropriate, e.g., in allocating food donations to food banks, course seats to students, and, more…
We examine the dynamics of informational efficiency in a market with asymmetrically informed, boundedly rational traders who adaptively learn optimal strategies using simple multiarmed bandit (MAB) algorithms. The strategies available to…
Mechanism design is now a standard tool in computer science for aligning the incentives of self-interested agents with the objectives of a system designer. There is, however, a fundamental disconnect between the traditional application…
We introduce a new model of stochastic bandits with adversarial corruptions which aims to capture settings where most of the input follows a stochastic pattern but some fraction of it can be adversarially changed to trick the algorithm,…
Overcoming the impact of selfish behavior of rational players in multiagent systems is a fundamental problem in game theory. Without any intervention from a central agent, strategic users take actions in order to maximize their personal…
We study the problem of multi-agent multi-armed bandits with adversarial corruption in a heterogeneous setting, where each agent accesses a subset of arms. The adversary can corrupt the reward observations for all agents. Agents share these…
Within mobility systems, the presence of self-interested users can lead to aggregate routing patterns that are far from the societal optimum which could be achieved by centrally controlling the users' choices. In this paper, we design a…
The Coin Change problem, also known as the Change-Making problem, is a well-studied combinatorial optimization problem, which involves minimizing the number of coins needed to make a specific change amount using a given set of coin…
Self-interested routing polices from individual users in a system can collectively lead to poor aggregate congestion in routing networks. The introduction of altruistic agents, whose goal is to benefit other agents in the system, can…
This paper is concerned with a model in econophysics, the subfield of statistical physics that applies concepts from traditional physics to economics. In our model, economical agents are represented by the vertices of a connected graph and…
Resource allocation takes place in various types of real-world complex systems such as urban traf- fic, social services institutions, economical and ecosystems. Mathematically, the dynamical process of complex resource allocation can be…