Related papers: Optimal Sequential Contests
In many first-price auctions, bidders face considerable strategic uncertainty: They cannot perfectly anticipate the other bidders' bidding behavior. We propose a model in which bidders do not know the entire distribution of opponent bids…
In common-interest stochastic games all players receive an identical payoff. Players participating in such games must learn to coordinate with each other in order to receive the highest-possible value. A number of reinforcement learning…
We analyse a sequential contest with two players in darts where one of the contestants enjoys a technical advantage. Using methods from the causal machine learning literature, we analyse the built-in advantage, which is the first-mover…
We consider a team-production environment where all participants are motivated by career concerns, and where a team's joint productive outcome may have different reputational implications for different team members. In this context, we…
When a game involves many agents or when communication between agents is not possible, it is useful to resort to distributed learning where each agent acts in complete autonomy without any information on the other agents' situations.…
This paper coins the notion of Joker games, a variant of concurrent games where the players are not strictly adversarial. Instead, Player 1 can get help from Player 2 by playing a Joker move. We formalize these games as cost games and…
In an all-pay auction, only one bidder wins but all bidders must pay the auctioneer. All-pay bidding games arise from attaching a similar bidding structure to traditional combinatorial games to determine which player moves next. In contrast…
Explore-and-exploit tradeoffs play a key role in recommendation systems (RSs), aiming at serving users better by learning from previous interactions. Despite their commercial success, the societal effects of explore-and-exploit mechanisms…
Can revealing one's competitive capabilities to an opponent offer strategic benefits? In this paper, we address this question in the context of General Lotto games, a class of two-player competitive resource allocation models. We consider…
Teams frequently compete on multiple fronts: political parties contest districts for majority control, contractors field specialized units to win procurement contracts, and squads play match by match for titles. Although the prize accrues…
We provide a characterization of revenue-optimal dynamic mechanisms in settings where a monopolist sells k items over k periods to a buyer who realizes his value for item i in the beginning of period i. We require that the mechanism…
Game-theoretical approach to the analysis of parallel algorithms is proposed. The approach is based on presentation of the parallel computing as a congestion game. In the game processes compete for resources such as core of a central…
Imitation is simple behavior which uses successful actions of others in order to deal with one's own problems. Because success of imitation generally depends on whether profit of an imitating agent coincides with those of other agents or…
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…
We propose a generic mechanism for incentivizing behavior in an arbitrary finite game using payments. Doing so is trivial if the mechanism is allowed to observe all actions taken in the game, as this allows it to simply punish those agents…
We introduce the concept of budget games. Players choose a set of tasks and each task has a certain demand on every resource in the game. Each resource has a budget. If the budget is not enough to satisfy the sum of all demands, it has to…
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…
We consider linear-quadratic-Gaussian (LQG) network games in which agents have quadratic payoffs that depend on their individual and neighbors' actions, and an unknown payoff-relevant state. An information designer determines the fidelity…
Patterns of wins and losses in pairwise contests, such as occur in sports and games, consumer research and paired comparison studies, and human and animal social hierarchies, are commonly analyzed using probabilistic models that allow one…
Routing games are used to to understand the impact of individual users' decisions on network efficiency. Most prior work on routing games uses a simplified model of network flow where all flow exists simultaneously, and users care about…