Related papers: Gambling in contests with regret
Strategy iteration is a technique frequently used for two-player games in order to determine the winner or compute payoffs, but to the best of our knowledge no general framework for strategy iteration has been considered. Inspired by…
How does competition in markets for information affect the creation and division of surplus? We study this question in a search environment in which an agent searches sequentially for a high-quality good and learns about the quality of…
In the game-theoretic model war of attrition, players are subject to an explicit cost proportional to the duration of contests. We construct a model where the time cost is not explicitly given, but instead depends implicitly on the…
Institutions and investors face the constant challenge of making accurate decisions and predictions regarding how best they should distribute their endowments. The problem of achieving an optimal outcome at minimal cost has been extensively…
Participants in socio-economic systems are often ranked based on their performance. Rankings conveniently reduce the complexity of such systems to ordered lists. Yet, it has been shown in many contexts that those who reach the top are not…
There is growing concern about tacit collusion using algorithmic pricing, and regulators need tools to help detect the possibility of such collusion. This paper studies how to design a hypothesis testing framework in order to decide whether…
Rating systems play an important role in competitive sports and games. They provide a measure of player skill, which incentivizes competitive performances and enables balanced match-ups. In this paper, we present a novel Bayesian rating…
We revisit the well-studied problem of designing fair and manipulation-resistant tournament rules. In this problem, we seek a mechanism that (probabilistically) identifies the winner of a tournament after observing round-robin play among…
We study contests in which two groups compete to win (or not to win) a group-specific public-good/bad prize. Each player in the groups can exert two types of effort: one to help her own group win the prize, and one to sabotage her own…
The orienteering problem is a well-studied and fundamental problem in transportation science. In the problem, we are given a graph with prizes on the nodes and lengths on the edges, together with a budget on the overall tour length. The…
We investigate the problem of gambling with uncertainty in outcome probabilities. Stochastic optimization models are proposed for optimal investing on events with mutually exclusive outcomes when probabilities are estimated using…
This paper proposes Competing Mechanism Games Played Through Agent (CMGPTA), an extension of the GPTA (Prat and Rustichini (2003)), where a Principal can offer any arbitrary mechanism that specifies a transfer schedule for each agent…
Multi-armed bandit problems are considered as a paradigm of the trade-off between exploring the environment to find profitable actions and exploiting what is already known. In the stationary case, the distributions of the rewards do not…
Motivated by applications to word-of-mouth advertising, we consider a game-theoretic scenario in which competing advertisers want to target initial adopters in a social network. Each advertiser wishes to maximize the resulting cascade of…
In $K$-armed dueling bandits, the learner receives preference feedback between arms, and the regret of an arm is defined in terms of its suboptimality to a $\textit{winner}$ arm. The $\textit{non-stationary}$ variant of the problem,…
We consider a repeated sequential game between a learner, who plays first, and an opponent who responds to the chosen action. We seek to design strategies for the learner to successfully interact with the opponent. While most previous…
In the ultimatum game, the challenge is to explain why responders reject non-zero offers thereby defying classical rationality. Fairness and related notions have been the main explanations so far. We explain this rejection behavior via the…
Automated decision-making tools increasingly assess individuals to determine if they qualify for high-stakes opportunities. A recent line of research investigates how strategic agents may respond to such scoring tools to receive favorable…
We study a Stackelberg game to examine how two agents determine to cooperate while competing with each other. Each selects an arrival time to a destination, the earlier one fetching a higher reward. There is, however, an inherent penalty in…
We study candidates' positioning when adjustments are possible in response to new information about voters' preferences. Re-positioning allows candidates to get closer to the median voter but is costly both financially and electorally. We…