Related papers: Optimal Sequential Contests
We use the Minority Game and some of its variants to show how efficiency depends on learning in models of agents competing for limited resources. Exact results from statistical physics give a clear understanding of the phenomenology, and…
Recent developments in sequential experimental design look to construct a policy that can efficiently navigate the design space, in a way that maximises the expected information gain. Whilst there is work on achieving tractable policies for…
This paper studies a setting in which multiple suppliers compete for a buyer's procurement business. The buyer faces uncertain demand and there is a requirement to reserve capacity in advance of knowing the demand. Each supplier has costs…
Information sharing between individuals is crucial to improve performance in collective tasks. However, in a competitive world, individuals may be reluctant to share information with the others, and it is still unclear how the presence of…
It is shown in recent studies that in a Stackelberg game the follower can manipulate the leader by deviating from their true best-response behavior. Such manipulations are computationally tractable and can be highly beneficial for the…
The maximization of submodular functions is an NP-Hard problem for certain subclasses of functions, for which a simple greedy algorithm has been shown to guarantee a solution whose quality is within 1/2 of the optimal. When this algorithm…
We study contests where the designer's objective is an extension of the widely studied objective of maximizing the total output: The designer gets zero marginal utility from a player's output if the output of the player is very low or very…
In this work we generalize standard Decision Theory by assuming that two outcomes can also be incomparable. Two motivating scenarios show how incomparability may be helpful to represent those situations where, due to lack of information,…
We build upon recent work [Kleinberg and Oren, 2014, Kleinberg et al., 2016, 2017] that considers present biased agents, who place more weight on costs they must incur now than costs they will incur in the future. They consider a graph…
How do different alliance mechanisms compare? In this work, we analyze various methods of forming an alliance in the Coalitional General Lotto game, a simple model of competitive resource allocation. In the game, Players 1 and 2…
We study a strategic experimentation game with exponential bandits, in which experiment outcomes are private. The equilibrium amount of experimentation is always higher than in the benchmark case where experiment outcomes are publicly…
Resource allocation problems across multiple contests are ubiquitous in adversarial settings, from military operations to market competition. While Colonel Blotto and General Lotto games have provided valuable theoretical foundations for…
We study a sequential decision-making model where a set of items is repeatedly matched to the same set of agents over multiple rounds. The objective is to determine a sequence of matchings that either maximizes the utility of the least…
We study the classic divide-and-choose method for equitably allocating divisible goods between two players who are rational, self-interested Bayesian agents. The players have additive values for the goods. The prior distributions on those…
In this paper, we characterize the extreme points of a class of multidimensional monotone functions. This result is then applied to large contests, where it provides a useful representation of optimal allocation rules under a broad class of…
We are interested in the problem of optimal commitments in rank-and-bid based auctions, a general class of auctions that include first price and all-pay auctions as special cases. Our main contribution is a novel approach to solve for…
We study the design of mechanisms -- e.g., auctions -- when the designer does not control information flows between mechanism participants. A mechanism equilibrium is leakage-proof if no player conditions their actions on leaked…
We study the design of information acquisition games-environments where a designer contracts their action on Sender's choice of experiment and the realized signals about some state-and identify which predictions can be made absent knowledge…
We present different versions of a conjecture which would express that first price mechanisms never work very badly in a very general class of problems. The definitions include most of the problems where there is a principal (seller) who…
The basic social dilemma is frequently captured by a public goods game where participants decide simultaneously whether to support a common pool or not and after the enhanced contributions are distributed uniformly among all competitors.…