Related papers: Pay or Play

We describe a two-stage mechanism that fully implements the set of efficient outcomes in two-agent environments with quasi-linear utilities. The mechanism asks one agent to set prices for each outcome, and the other agent to make a choice,…

We study Bayesian coordination games where agents receive noisy private information over the game's payoff structure, and over each others' actions. If private information over actions is precise, we find that agents can coordinate on…

We study the problem of finding equilibrium strategies in multi-agent games with incomplete payoff information, where the payoff matrices are only known to the players up to some bounded uncertainty sets. In such games, an ex-post…

We study a setting in which two players play a (possibly approximate) Nash equilibrium of a bimatrix game, while a learner observes only their actions and has no knowledge of the equilibrium or the underlying game. A natural question is…

Quitting games are one of the simplest stochastic games in which at any stage each player has only two possible actions, continue and quit. The game ends as soon as at least one player chooses to quit. The players then receive a payoff,…

Strategic interactions between a group of individuals or organisations can be modelled as games played on networks, where a player's payoff depends not only on their actions but also on those of their neighbours. Inferring the network…

Originating in evolutionary game theory, the class of "zero-determinant" strategies enables a player to unilaterally enforce linear payoff relationships in simple repeated games. An upshot of this kind of payoff constraint is that it can…

We consider a stochastic tournament game in which each player is rewarded based on her rank in terms of the completion time of her own task and is subject to cost of effort. When players are homogeneous and the rewards are purely rank…

In this paper, we introduce and study a class of games called price-coupling games that arise in many scenarios, especially in the electricity industry. In a price-coupling game, there is a part of the objective function of a player which…

We introduce a class of learning problems where the agent is presented with a series of tasks. Intuitively, if there is relation among those tasks, then the information gained during execution of one task has value for the execution of…

In many multiagent environments, a designer has some, but limited control over the game being played. In this paper, we formalize this by considering incompletely specified games, in which some entries of the payoff matrices can be chosen…

We study network games in which players choose both the partners with whom they associate and an action level (e.g., effort) that creates spillovers for those partners. We introduce a framework and two solution concepts, extending standard…

We consider a network of coupled agents playing the Prisoner's Dilemma game, in which players are allowed to pick a strategy in the interval [0,1], with 0 corresponding to defection, 1 to cooperation, and intermediate values representing…

A recent body of experimental literature has studied empirical game-theoretical analysis, in which we have partial knowledge of a game, consisting of observations of a subset of the pure-strategy profiles and their associated payoffs to…

We analyze, both analytically and numerically, the self-organization of a system of "selfish" adaptive agents playing an arbitrary iterated pairwise game (defined by a 2X2 payoff matrix). Examples of possible games to play are: the…

Using methods from the statistical mechanics of disordered systems we analyze the properties of bimatrix games with random payoffs in the limit where the number of pure strategies of each player tends to infinity. We analytically calculate…

We consider any network environment in which the "best shot game" is played. This is the case where the possible actions are only two for every node (0 and 1), and the best response for a node is 1 if and only if all her neighbors play 0. A…

The paper proposes a natural measure space of zero-sum perfect information games with upper semicontinuous payoffs. Each game is specified by the game tree, and by the assignment of the active player and of the capacity to each node of the…

We examine a two-person game we call Will-Testing in which the strategy space for both players is a real number. It has no equilibrium. When an infinitely large set of players plays this in all possible pairings, there is an equilibrium for…

This paper studies a game in which an informed sender with state-independent preferences uses verifiable messages to convince a receiver to choose an action from a finite set. We characterize the equilibrium outcomes of the game and compare…