Related papers: Optimal Sequential Contests
We study the efficiency of sequential first-price item auctions at (subgame perfect) equilibrium. This auction format has recently attracted much attention, with previous work establishing positive results for unit-demand valuations and…
Does a high dispersal rate provide a competitive advantage when risking competitive exclusion? To this day, the theoretical literature cannot answer this question in full generality. The present paper focuses on the simplest mathematical…
The game of bridge consists of two stages: bidding and playing. While playing is proved to be relatively easy for computer programs, bidding is very challenging. During the bidding stage, each player knowing only his/her own cards needs to…
Consider a setting in which a policy maker assigns subjects to treatments, observing each outcome before the next subject arrives. Initially, it is unknown which treatment is best, but the sequential nature of the problem permits learning…
In this paper, we present a multi-period trading model in the style of Kyle (1985)'s inside trading model, by assuming that there are at least two insiders in the market with long-lived private information, under the requirement that each…
The aim of this article is to propose a core game theory model of transaction costs wherein it is indicated how direct costs determine the probability of loss and subsequent transaction costs. The existence of optimum is proven, and the way…
Incentives are more likely to elicit desired outcomes when they are designed based on accurate models of agents' strategic behavior. A growing literature, however, suggests that people do not quite behave like standard economic agents in a…
In this work the properties of multi choice minority games are studied by means of extensive computational simulations. We have considered several ways of rewarding the strategies of the players and compared the resulting behaviours of the…
We introduce and analyze a variation of the Bertrand game in which the revenue is shared between two players. This game models situations in which one economic agent can provide goods/services to consumers either directly or through an…
In the last few decades, numerous experiments have shown that humans do not always behave so as to maximize their material payoff. Cooperative behavior when non-cooperation is a dominant strategy (with respect to the material payoffs) is…
We present an approach for systematically anticipating the actions and policies employed by \emph{oblivious} environments in concurrent stochastic games, while maximizing a reward function. Our main contribution lies in the synthesis of a…
Incentives are key to the success of crowdsourcing which heavily depends on the level of user participation. This paper designs an incentive mechanism to motivate a heterogeneous crowd of users to actively participate in crowdsourcing…
Mean-payoff games are important quantitative models for open reactive systems. They have been widely studied as games of full observation. In this paper we investigate the algorithmic properties of several sub-classes of mean-payoff games…
To make decisions organisms often accumulate information across multiple timescales. However, most experimental and modeling studies of decision-making focus on sequences of independent trials. On the other hand, natural environments are…
A Stackelberg game is played between a leader and a follower. The leader first chooses an action, then the follower plays his best response. The goal of the leader is to pick the action that will maximize his payoff given the follower's…
How can one efficiently share payoffs with collaborators when participating in risky research? First, I show that efficiency can be achieved by allocating payoffs asymmetrically between the researcher who makes a breakthrough ("winner") and…
This paper considers the basic problem of scheduling jobs online with preemption to maximize the number of jobs completed by their deadline on $m$ identical machines. The main result is an $O(1)$ competitive deterministic algorithm for any…
Prior work has studied the computational complexity of computing optimal strategies to commit to in Stackelberg or leadership games, where a leader commits to a strategy which is observed by one or more followers. We extend this setting to…
This paper studies the optimal mechanism to motivate effort in a dynamic principal-agent model without transfers. An agent is engaged in a task with uncertain future rewards and can quit at any time. The principal knows the reward and…
In many competitive settings, from education to politics, rules do not reward effort evenly, and thresholds (e.g., grade cutoffs or electoral majorities) make some moments disproportionately important. Success thus depends on efficiently…