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We consider a matching problem, which is meaningful in team competitions, as well as in information theory, recommender systems, and assignment problems. In the competitions which we study, each competitor in a team order plays a match with…
The task of ranking individuals or teams, based on a set of comparisons between pairs, arises in various contexts, including sporting competitions and the analysis of dominance hierarchies among animals and humans. Given data on which…
We study the complexity of deciding whether there is a tie in a given approval-based multiwinner election, as well as the complexity of counting tied winning committees. We consider a family of Thiele rules, their greedy variants,…
We study the effects of randomness on competitions based on an elementary random process in which there is a finite probability that a weaker team upsets a stronger team. We apply this model to sports leagues and sports tournaments, and…
We study independent searchers competing for a target under restarts and find that introduction of restarts tends to enhance the search efficiency of an already efficient searcher. As a result, the difference between the search…
Randomized search algorithms for hard combinatorial problems exhibit a large variability of performances. We study the different types of rare events which occur in such out-of-equilibrium stochastic processes and we show how they cooperate…
Competitor rating systems for head-to-head games are typically used to measure playing strength from game outcomes. Ratings computed from these systems are often used to select top competitors for elite events, for pairing players of…
Computing reachability probabilities is a fundamental problem in the analysis of probabilistic programs. This paper aims at a comprehensive and comparative account on various martingale-based methods for over- and under-approximating…
We demonstrate the usefulness of adding delay to infinite games with quantitative winning conditions. In a delay game, one of the players may delay her moves to obtain a lookahead on her opponent's moves. We show that determining the winner…
Teams frequently compete on multiple fronts: political parties contest districts for majority control, contractors field specialized units to win procurement contracts, and squads play match by match for titles. Although the prize accrues…
Ranking athletes by their performance in competitions and tournaments is common in every popular sport and has significant benefits that contribute to both the organization and strategic aspects of competitions. Although rankings are…
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…
This paper considers competitive mobility-on-demand systems where a group of vehicle sharing companies, on one hand, want to collectively regulate the traffic of the user queueing network, and on the other hand, maximize their own profits…
Professional team sports provide an excellent domain for studying the dynamics of social competitions. These games are constructed with simple, well-defined rules and payoffs that admit a high-dimensional set of possible actions and…
Competitive interactions represent one of the driving forces behind evolution and natural selection in biological and sociological systems. For example, animals in an ecosystem may vie for food or mates; in a market economy, firms may…
We study secretary problems in settings with multiple agents. In the standard secretary problem, a sequence of arbitrary awards arrive online, in a random order, and a single decision maker makes an immediate and irrevocable decision…
The chase is a fundamental algorithm with ubiquitous uses in database theory. Given a database and a set of existential rules (aka tuple-generating dependencies), it iteratively extends the database to ensure that the rules are satisfied in…
In this paper we introduce and experimentally compare alternative algorithms to join uncertain relations. Different algorithms are based on specific principles, e.g., sorting, indexing, or building intermediate relational tables to apply…
We compare games under delayed control and delay games, two types of infinite games modelling asynchronicity in reactive synthesis. Our main result, the interreducibility of the existence of sure winning strategies for the protagonist,…
We study the impact of competing time delays in coupled stochastic synchronization and coordination problems. We consider two types of delays: transmission delays between interacting elements and processing, cognitive, or execution delays…