Related papers: Price of Competition and Dueling Games
We revisit classic algorithmic search and optimization problems from the perspective of competition. Rather than a single optimizer minimizing expected cost, we consider a zero-sum game in which an optimization problem is presented to two…
We present a model of competition between web search algorithms, and study the impact of such competition on user welfare. In our model, search providers compete for customers by strategically selecting which search results to display in…
An extensive literature in economics and social science addresses contests, in which players compete to outperform each other on some measurable criterion, often referred to as a player's score, or output. Players incur costs that are an…
This paper proposes an optimization algorithm based on how human fight and learn from each duelist. Since this algorithm is based on population, the proposed algorithm starts with an initial set of duelists. The duel is to determine the…
We introduce and study the problem of dueling optimization with a monotone adversary, which is a generalization of (noiseless) dueling convex optimization. The goal is to design an online algorithm to find a minimizer $\mathbf{x}^{*}$ for a…
We study the problem of repeated play in a zero-sum game in which the payoff matrix may change, in a possibly adversarial fashion, on each round; we call these Online Matrix Games. Finding the Nash Equilibrium (NE) of a two player zero-sum…
I study symmetric competitions in which each player chooses an arbitrary distribution over a one-dimensional performance index, subject to a convex cost. I establish existence of a symmetric equilibrium, document various properties it must…
We study a general scenario of simultaneous contests that allocate prizes based on equal sharing: each contest awards its prize to all players who satisfy some contest-specific criterion, and the value of this prize to a winner decreases as…
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 study $n$-dimensional contests between two players with heterogeneous effort costs, where each dimension (battle) is modeled as a Tullock contest. Prize-allocation rules are identity-independent, budget-balanced, and weakly increasing in…
We consider a contest game modelling a contest where reviews for $m$ proposals are crowdsourced from $n$ strategic agents} players. Player $i$ has a skill $s_{i\ell}$ for reviewing proposal $\ell$; for her review, she strategically chooses…
Within the framework of Game Theory, contests study decision-making in those situations or conflicts when rewards depend on the relative rank between contenders rather than their absolute performance. By relying on the formalism of Tullock…
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…
A competitive market is modeled as a game of incomplete information. One player observes some payoff-relevant state and can sell (possibly noisy) messages thereof to the other, whose willingness to pay is contingent on their own beliefs. We…
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 study a game between two firms in which each provide a service based on machine learning. The firms are presented with the opportunity to purchase a new corpus of data, which will allow them to potentially improve the quality of their…
This paper investigates design of noncooperative games from an optimization and control theoretic perspective. Pricing mechanisms are used as a design tool to ensure that the Nash equilibrium of a fairly general class of noncooperative…
This paper considers convex games involving multiple agents that aim to minimize their own cost functions using locally available information. A common assumption in the study of such games is that the agents are symmetric, meaning that…
We consider a single buyer with a combinatorial preference that would like to purchase related products and services from different vendors, where each vendor supplies exactly one product. We study the general case where subsets of products…
We design and analyze minimax-optimal algorithms for online linear optimization games where the player's choice is unconstrained. The player strives to minimize regret, the difference between his loss and the loss of a post-hoc benchmark…