Related papers: Incentives and Coordination in Bottleneck Models
We consider team zero-sum network congestion games with $n$ agents playing against $k$ interceptors over a graph $G$. The agents aim to minimize their collective cost of sending traffic over paths in $G$, which is an aggregation of edge…
This article presents an interdisciplinary study of physical and social psychological effects on crowd dynamics based on a series of bottleneck experiments. Bottlenecks are of particular interest for applications such as crowd management…
To regulate a social system comprised of self-interested agents, economic incentives are often required to induce a desirable outcome. This incentive design problem naturally possesses a bilevel structure, in which a designer modifies the…
In repeated-game applications where both the collusive and non-collusive outcomes can be supported as equilibria, researchers must resolve underlying selection questions if theory will be used to understand counterfactual policies. One…
We study the strategic purchasing of priorities in a time-dependent accumulating priority M/G/$1$ queue. We formulate a non-cooperative game in which customers purchase priority coefficients with the goal of reducing waiting costs in…
Queueing networks are typically modelled assuming that the arrival process is exogenous, and unaffected by admission control, scheduling policies, etc. In many situations, however, users choose the time of their arrival strategically,…
We study a market mechanism that sets edge prices to incentivize strategic agents to efficiently share limited network capacity. In this market, agents form coalitions, with each coalition sharing a unit capacity of a selected route and…
We analyze, both analytically and numerically, the self-organization of a system of "selfish" adaptive agents playing an arbitrary iterated pairwise game (defined by a 2X2 payoff matrix). Examples of possible games to play are: the…
Two issues of algorithmic collusion are addressed in this paper. First, we show that in a general class of symmetric games, including Prisoner's Dilemma, Bertrand competition, and any (nonlinear) mixture of first and second price auction,…
We study allocation mechanisms that utilize costly signaling as a screening tool. A social planner aims to maximize social welfare, defined as the weighted sum of agents' utilities, while implementing a specific allocation rule. Within a…
A central goal in algorithmic game theory is to analyze the performance of decentralized multiagent systems, like communication and information networks. In the absence of a central planner who can enforce how these systems are utilized,…
Price of anarchy quantifies the degradation of social welfare in games due to the lack of a centralized authority that can enforce the optimal outcome. At its antipodes, mechanism design studies how to ameliorate these effects by…
There is a broad recognition that commitment-based mechanisms can promote coordination and cooperative behaviours in both biological populations and self-organised multi-agent systems by making individuals' intentions explicit prior to…
Mixed-motive multi-agent settings are rife with persistent free-riding because individual effort benefits all members equally, yet each member bears the full cost of their own contribution. Classical work by Holmstr\"om established that…
In dynamic noncooperative games, each player makes conjectures about other players' reactions before choosing a strategy. However, resulting equilibria may be multiple and do not always lead to desirable outcomes. These issues are typically…
In this work we are concerned with the design of efficient mechanisms while eliciting limited information from the agents. First, we study the performance of sampling approximations in facility location games. Our key result is to show that…
We present an end-to-end, model-based deep reinforcement learning agent which dynamically attends to relevant parts of its state during planning. The agent uses a bottleneck mechanism over a set-based representation to force the number of…
Decision-making individuals often imitate their highest-earning fellows rather than optimize their own utilities, due to bounded rationality and incomplete information. Perpetual fluctuations between decisions have been reported as the…
We study the consequences of information asymmetries and misaligned incentives in settings with multiple independent agents. We model an interaction between a Sender, who holds vital private information but cannot act, and a Receiver, who…
The emergence of new communication technologies allows us to expand our understanding of distributed control and consider collaborative decision-making paradigms. With collaborative algorithms, certain local decision-making entities (or…