Related papers: Some people have all the luck
The focal point of this paper is the so-called Kelly Criterion, a prescription for optimal resource allocation among a set of gambles which are repeated over time. The criterion calls for maximization of the expected value of the…
We study the robustness of approval-based participatory budgeting (PB) rules to random noise in the votes. Our contributions are twofold. First, we study the computational complexity of the #Flip-Bribery problem, where given a PB instance…
In pursuit of participatory budgeting (PB) outcomes with broader fairness guarantees, we initiate the study of lotteries over discrete PB outcomes. As the projects have heterogeneous costs, the amount spent may not be equal ex ante and ex…
In allocating objects via lotteries, it is common to consider ordinal rules that rely solely on how agents rank degenerate lotteries. While ordinality is often imposed due to cognitive or informational constraints, we provide another…
We study games with incomplete information and characterize when a feasible outcome is Pareto efficient. Outcomes with excessive randomization are inefficient: generically, the total number of action profiles across states must be strictly…
In the compulsive gambler process there is a finite set of agents who meet pairwise at random times ($i$ and $j$ meet at times of a rate-$\nu_{ij}$ Poisson process) and, upon meeting, play an instantaneous fair game in which one wins the…
The Drake equation has been used many times to estimate the number of observable civilizations in the Galaxy. However, the uncertainty of the outcome is so great that any individual result is of limited use, as predictions can range from a…
Bribery in elections is an important problem in computational social choice theory. However, bribery with money is often illegal in elections. Motivated by this, we introduce the notion of frugal bribery and formulate two new pertinent…
We consider games in which players search for a hidden prize, and they have asymmetric information about the prize location. We study the social payoff in equilibria of these games. We present sufficient conditions for the existence of an…
We revisit the game in which each of several players chooses a pattern and then a coin is flipped repeatedly until one of these patterns is generated. In particular, we demonstrate how to compute the probability of any one player winning…
We provide a mechanism that uses two biased coins and implements any distribution on a finite set of elements, in such a way that even if the outcomes of one of the coins is determined by an adversary, the final distribution remains…
Winners-take-all situations introduce an incentive for agents to diversify their behavior, since doing so will result in splitting an eventual price with fewer people. At the same time, when the payoff of a process depends on a parameter…
We study the problem of optimizing the betting frequency in a dynamic game setting using Kelly's celebrated expected logarithmic growth criterion as the performance metric. The game is defined by a sequence of bets with independent and…
Testing by betting has been a cornerstone of the game-theoretic statistics literature. One bets against the null hypothesis, and the accumulated wealth $W_t$ quantifies the evidence against the null hypothesis after $t$ rounds, and the null…
Assume that letters (from a finite alphabet) in a text form a Markov chain. We track two distinct words, $U$ and $D$. A gambler gains 1 point for each occurrence of $U$ (including overlapping occurrences) and loses 1 point for each…
We consider the complexity of finding a correlated equilibrium of an $n$-player game in a model that allows the algorithm to make queries on players' payoffs at pure strategy profiles. Randomized regret-based dynamics are known to yield an…
In a multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem a gambler needs to choose at each round of play one of K arms, each characterized by an unknown reward distribution. Reward realizations are only observed when an arm is selected, and the gambler's…
We consider collaborative systems where users make contributions across multiple available projects and are rewarded for their contributions in individual projects according to a local sharing of the value produced. This serves as a model…
Two simple and attractive mechanisms for the fair division of indivisible goods in an online setting are LIKE and BALANCED LIKE. We study some fundamental computational problems concerning the outcomes of these mechanisms. In particular, we…
The largely dominant meritocratic paradigm of highly competitive Western cultures is rooted on the belief that success is due mainly, if not exclusively, to personal qualities such as talent, intelligence, skills, efforts or risk taking.…