Related papers: Exploring optimal institutional incentives for pub…
Punishment, especially selfish punishment, has recently been identified as a potent promoter in sustaining or even enhancing the cooperation among unrelated individuals. However, without other key mechanisms, the first-order social dilemma…
In this paper, we investigate the distributed optimal control problem for a kind of nonlinear multi-agent systems. In particular,both the state and the system dynamic structures of each agent are private and can only be shared among…
Selective contests can impair participants' overall welfare in overcompetitive environments, such as school admissions. This paper models the situation as an optimal contest design problem with binary actions, treating effort costs as…
The dilemma in cooperation is one of the major concerns in game theory. In a public-goods game, each individual pays a cost for cooperation, or to prevent defection, and receives a reward from the collected cost in a group. Thus, defection…
Social dilemmas are situations in which collective interests are at odds with private interests: pollution, depletion of natural resources, and intergroup conflicts, are at their core social dilemmas. Because of their multidisciplinarity…
This paper focuses on the coordination of a large population of dynamic agents with private information over multiple periods. Each agent maximizes the individual utility, while the coordinator determines the market rule to achieve group…
We address a practical problem ubiquitous in modern marketing campaigns, in which a central agent tries to learn a policy for allocating strategic financial incentives to customers and observes only bandit feedback. In contrast to…
We present an accelerated algorithm for the solution of static Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equations related to optimal control problems. Our scheme is based on a classic policy iteration procedure, which is known to have superlinear…
Pro-social punishment is a key driver of harmonious and stable society. However, this institution is vulnerable to corruption since law-violators can avoid sanctioning by paying bribes to corrupt law-enforcers. Consequently, to understand…
Understanding cooperative behavior in biological and social systems constitutes a scientific challenge, being the object of intense research over the past decades. Many mechanisms have been proposed to explain the presence and persistence…
Indirect reciprocity is one of the major mechanisms of the evolution of cooperation. Because constant monitoring and accurate evaluation in moral assessments tend to be costly, indirect reciprocity can be exploited by cost evaders. A recent…
Online platforms in the Internet Economy commonly incorporate recommender systems that recommend products (or "arms") to users (or "agents"). A key challenge in this domain arises from myopic agents who are naturally incentivized to exploit…
This study addresses the challenges of dynamics and complexity in intelligent human-computer interaction and proposes a reinforcement learning-based optimization framework to improve long-term returns and overall experience. Human-computer…
It is very common to observe crowds of individuals solving similar problems with similar information in a largely independent manner. We argue here that crowds can become "smarter," i.e., more efficient and robust, by partially following…
How do incentive levels affect strategic behaviour? We address this with an experiment that separately identifies own- and opponent-incentive effects in two dominance-solvable games that differ in strategic complexity. Higher own incentives…
Recent research in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has shown success in learning social behavior and cooperation. Social dilemmas between agents in mixed-sum settings have been studied extensively, but there is little research…
This paper is concerned with stochastic impulse control problems in which the running cost changes depending on the impulse control. Because of such a dependence, it brings several difficulties when the usual dynamic programming principle…
Reputation and punishment are significant guidelines for regulating individual behavior in human society, and those with a good reputation are more likely to be imitated by others. In addition, society imposes varying degrees of punishment…
A central challenge in using price signals to coordinate the electricity consumption of a group of users is the operator's lack of knowledge of the users due to privacy concerns. In this paper, we develop a two-time-scale incentive…
In this paper, we propose a new framework for the design of incentives aimed at promoting innovation diffusion in social influence networks. In particular, our framework relies on an extension of the Friedkin and Johnsen opinion dynamics…