Related papers: Peace through bribing
Existing protocols for multilateral negotiation require a full consensus among the negotiating parties. In contrast, we propose a protocol for multilateral negotiation that allows partial consensus, wherein only a subset of the negotiating…
We investigate the implementation of reduced-form allocation probabilities in a two-person bargaining problem without side payments, where the agents have to select one alternative from a finite set of social alternatives. We provide a…
Situations where people have to decide between hurting themselves or another person are at the core of many individual and global conflicts. Yet little is known about how people behave when facing these situations in the lab. Here we report…
We study the complexity of constructive bribery in the context of structured multiwinner approval elections. Given such an election, we ask whether a certain candidate can join the winning committee by adding, deleting, or swapping…
We study stable matching problems in networks where players are embedded in a social context, and may incorporate friendship relations or altruism into their decisions. Each player is a node in a social network and strives to form a good…
Costly pre-play messages can deter unnecessary wars - but the same messages can also entrench stalemates once violence begins. We develop an overlapping-generations model of a security dilemma with persistent group types (normal vs bad),…
We study the problem of selling identical goods to n unit-demand bidders in a setting in which the total supply of goods is unknown to the mechanism. Items arrive dynamically, and the seller must make the allocation and payment decisions…
We explore an application of all-pay auctions to model trade wars and territorial annexation. Specifically, in the model we consider the expected resource, production, and aggressive (military/tariff) power are public information, but…
In an auction each party bids a certain amount and the one which bids the highest is the winner. Interestingly, auctions can also be used as models for other real-world systems. In an all pay auction all parties must pay a forfeit for…
Everyone wants clean air, peace and other public goods but is tempted to freeride on others' efforts. The usual way out of this dilemma is to impose norms, maintain reputations and incentivize individuals to contribute. In situations of…
Is there an equilibrium for distributed consensus when all agents except one collude to steer the decision value towards their preference? If an equilibrium exists, then an $n-1$ size coalition cannot do better by deviating from the…
Each period, two players bargain over a unit of surplus. Each player chooses between remaining flexible and committing to a take-it-or-leave-it offer at a cost. If players' committed demands are incompatible, then the current-period surplus…
Prior work on the complexity of bribery assumes that the bribery happens simultaneously, and that the briber has full knowledge of all voters' votes. But neither of those assumptions always holds. In many real-world settings, votes come in…
We model a delivery platform facilitating transactions among three sides: buyers, stores, and couriers. In addition to buyers paying store-specific purchase prices and couriers receiving store--buyer-specific delivery compensation from the…
To verify the robustness of a program or protocol, it is common in the computer science community to rely on the theoretical framework of game theory. In particular, if one seeks to enforce a desired property, or specification, despite an…
The goal of an auction is to determine commodity prices such that all participants are perfectly happy. Such a solution is called a competitive equilibrium and does not exist in general. For this reason we are interested in solutions which…
Prior work on the complexity of bribery assumes that the bribery happens simultaneously, and that the briber has full knowledge of all votes. However, in many real-world settings votes come in sequentially, and the briber may have a…
We consider a sender-receiver game with an outside option for the sender. After the cheap talk phase, the receiver makes a proposal to the sender, which the latter can reject. We study situations in which the sender's approval is crucial to…
In the Shift-Bribery problem we are given an election, a preferred candidate, and the costs of shifting this preferred candidate up the voters' preference orders. The goal is to find such a set of shifts that ensures that the preferred…
I introduce a favor exchange model where favors are substitutable and study bilateral enforcement of cooperation. Without substitutability, the value of a relationship does not depend on the rest of the network, and in equilibrium there is…