Related papers: Excuse Me! or The Courteous Theatregoers' Problem
In repeated interactions between individuals, we do not expect that exactly the same situation will occur from one time to another. Contrary to what is common in models of repeated games in the literature, most real situations may differ a…
The problem of how to achieve cooperation among rational peers in order to discourage free riding is one that has received a lot of attention in peer-to-peer computing and is still an important one. The field of game theory is applied to…
Three theories offer competing predictions about how people respond to growing diversity in their social environment. Contact theory suggests more exposure to out-groups reduces prejudice; conflict theory predicts a stronger in-group…
Understanding the evolution of human social systems requires flexible formalisms for the emergence of institutions. Although game theory is normally used to model interactions individually, larger spaces of games can be helpful for modeling…
We revisit the problem of fairly allocating a sequence of time slots when agents may have different levels of patience (Mackenzie and Komornik 2023). For each number of agents, we provide a lower threshold and an upper threshold on the…
The iterated prisoner's dilemma is a game that produces many counter-intuitive and complex behaviors in a social environment, based on very simple basic rules. It illustrates that cooperation can be a good thing even in a competitive world,…
We study a simple example of a sequential game illustrating problems connected with making rational decisions that are universal for social sciences. The set of chooser's optimal decisions that manifest his preferences in case of a constant…
Corrigibility of autonomous agents is an under explored part of system design, with previous work focusing on single agent systems. It has been suggested that uncertainty over the human preferences acts to keep the agents corrigible, even…
We consider two mobile oblivious robots that evolve in a continuous Euclidean space. We require the two robots to solve the rendezvous problem (meeting in finite time at the same location, not known beforehand) despite the possibility that…
A new model of collusions in an organization is proposed. Each actor $a_{i=1,\cdots,N}$ disposes one unique good $g_{j=1,\cdots,N}$. Each actor $a_i$ has also a list of other goods which he/she needs, in order from desired most to those…
A fixed number of passengers independently board one of several buses uniformly at random. The lonely passenger problem is to prove that the probability of at least one passenger being the only one in their bus is increasing in the number…
A mediator observes no-regret learners playing an extensive-form game repeatedly across $T$ rounds. The mediator attempts to steer players toward some desirable predetermined equilibrium by giving (nonnegative) payments to players. We call…
We study a model of a competing population of N adaptive agents, with similar capabilities, repeatedly deciding whether to attend a bar with an arbitrary cutoff L. Decisions are based upon past outcomes. The agents are only told whether the…
It is generally believed that in a situation where individual and collective interests are in conflict, the availability of optional participation is a key mechanism to maintain cooperation. Surprisingly, this effect is sensitive to the use…
In several matching markets, in order to achieve diversity, agents' priorities are allowed to vary across an institution's available seats, and the institution is let to choose agents in a lexicographic fashion based on a predetermined…
Consider an M/M/$s$ queue with the additional feature that the arrival rate is a random variable of which only the mean, variance, and range are known. Using semi-infinite linear programming and duality theory for moment problems, we…
In many situations people make sequences of similar, but unrelated decisions. Such decision sequences are prevalent in many important contexts including judicial judgments, loan approvals, college admissions, and athletic competitions. A…
The emergence and survival of cooperation is one of the hardest problems still open in science. Several factors such as the existence of punishment, fluctuations in finite systems, repeated interactions and the formation of prestige may all…
The principle that rational agents should maximize expected utility or choiceworthiness is intuitively plausible in many ordinary cases of decision-making under uncertainty. But it is less plausible in cases of extreme, low-probability risk…
An-ever increasing number of social media websites, electronic newspapers and Internet forums allow visitors to leave comments for others to read and interact. This exchange is not free from participants with malicious intentions, which do…