Related papers: Stability-Preserving, Time-Efficient Mechanisms fo…
We study the linear stability of flock and mill ring solutions of two individual based models for biological swarming. The individuals interact via a nonlocal interaction potential that is repulsive in the short range and attractive in the…
This paper considers the problem of real-time control and learning in dynamic systems subjected to parametric uncertainties. We propose a combination of a Reinforcement Learning (RL) based policy in the outer loop suitably chosen to ensure…
Interdistrict school choice programs-where a student can be assigned to a school outside of her district-are widespread in the US, yet the market-design literature has not considered such programs. We introduce a model of interdistrict…
We consider a computing system where a master processor assigns tasks for execution to worker processors through the Internet. We model the workers decision of whether to comply (compute the task) or not (return a bogus result to save the…
We introduce a planner designed to guide robot manipulators in stably placing objects within intricate scenes. Our proposed method reverses the traditional approach to object placement: our planner selects contact points first and then…
We study the quality of outcomes in repeated games when the population of players is dynamically changing and participants use learning algorithms to adapt to the changing environment. Game theory classically considers Nash equilibria of…
This paper analyzes a steady state matching model interrelating the education and labor sectors. In this model, a heterogeneous population of students match with teachers to enhance their cognitive skills. As adults, they then choose to…
We introduce a generalized version of the famous Stable Marriage problem, now based on multi-modal preference lists. The central twist herein is to allow each agent to rank its potentially matching counterparts based on more than one…
The goal of this article is to investigate how human participants allocate their limited time to decisions with different properties. We report the results of two behavioral experiments. In each trial of the experiments, the participant…
Natural disasters can cause substantial negative socio-economic impacts around the world, due to mortality, relocation, rates, and reconstruction decisions. Robotics has been successfully applied to identify and rescue victims during the…
We investigate the scheduling of a common resource between several concurrent users when the feasible transmission rate of each user varies randomly over time. Time is slotted and users arrive and depart upon service completion. This may…
We use inverse methods of statistical mechanics to explore trade-offs associated with designing interactions to stabilize self-assembled structures against changes in density or temperature. Specifically, we find isotropic,convex-repulsive…
We consider reinforcement learning in changing Markov Decision Processes where both the state-transition probabilities and the reward functions may vary over time. For this problem setting, we propose an algorithm using a sliding window…
Most US school districts draw geographic "attendance zones" to assign children to schools based on their home address, a process that can replicate existing neighborhood racial/ethnic and socioeconomic status (SES) segregation in schools.…
The tendency of repeating past choices more often than expected from the history of outcomes has been repeatedly empirically observed in reinforcement learning experiments. It can be explained by at least two computational processes:…
The school choice problem concerns the design and implementation of matching mechanisms that produce school assignments for students within a given public school district. In this note we define a simple student-optimal criterion that is…
We study a dynamic allocation problem that arises in various scenarios where mobile clients joining and leaving the system have to communicate with static stations via radio transmissions. Restrictions are a maximum delay, or laxity,…
Applications such as employees sharing office spaces over a workweek can be modeled as problems where agents are matched to resources over multiple rounds. Agents' requirements limit the set of compatible resources and the rounds in which…
We study stable matchings that are robust to preference changes in the two-sided stable matching setting of Gale and Shapley[GS62]. Given two instances $A$ and $B$ on the same set of agents, a matching is said to be robust if it is stable…
We consider two-sided matching markets, and study the incentives of agents to circumvent a centralized clearing house by signing binding contracts with one another. It is well-known that if the clearing house implements a stable match and…