Related papers: From Monopoly to Competition: Optimal Contests Pre…
We consider two-player contests with the possibility of ties and study the effect of different tie-breaking rules on effort. For ratio-form and difference-form contests that admit pure-strategy Nash equilibrium, we find that the effort of…
We introduce pricing formulas for competition and collusion models of two-sided markets with an outside option. For the competition model, we find conditions under which prices and consumer surplus may increase or decrease if the outside…
Platforms often host multiple online groups with overlapping topics and members. How can researchers and designers understand how related groups affect each other? Inspired by population ecology, prior research in social computing and…
When opposing parties compete for a prize, the sunk effort players exert during the conflict can affect the value of the winner's reward. These spillovers can have substantial influence on the equilibrium behavior of participants in…
We study procurement design when the buyer is uncertain about both the value of the good and the seller's cost. The buyer has a conjectured model but does not fully trust it. She first identifies mechanisms that maximize her worst-case…
We consider a discrete time competition model. Populations compete for common limited resources but they have different fertilities and mortalities rates. We compare dynamical properties of this model with its continuous counterpart. We…
Biological and social systems are structured at multiple scales, and the incentives of individuals who interact in a group may diverge from the collective incentive of the group as a whole. Mechanisms to resolve this tension are responsible…
Benchmark hacking refers to tuning a machine learning model to score highly on certain evaluation criteria without improving true generalization or faithfully solving the intended problem. We study this phenomenon in a generic machine…
This paper characterizes equilibrium properties of a broad class of economic models that allow multiple heterogeneous agents to interact in heterogeneous manners across several markets. Our key contribution is a new theorem providing…
We analyze the dynamics of competitions with a large number of players. In our model, n players compete against each other and the winner is decided based on the standings: in each competition, the mth ranked player wins. We solve for the…
We study a model of competition among nomadic agents for time-varying and location-specific resources, arising in crowd-sourced transportation services, online communities, and traditional location-based economic activity. This model…
We study the interaction between a network designer and an adversary over a dynamical network. The network consists of nodes performing continuous-time distributed averaging. The adversary strategically disconnects a set of links to prevent…
All-pay auctions, a common mechanism for various human and agent interactions, suffers, like many other mechanisms, from the possibility of players' failure to participate in the auction. We model such failures, and fully characterize…
We consider a stochastic tournament game in which each player is rewarded based on her rank in terms of the completion time of her own task and is subject to cost of effort. When players are homogeneous and the rewards are purely rank…
According to the fundamental theorems of welfare economics, any competitive equilibrium is Pareto efficient. Unfortunately, competitive equilibrium prices only exist under strong assumptions such as perfectly divisible goods and convex…
We consider the design of experiments to evaluate treatments that are administered by self-interested agents, each seeking to achieve the highest evaluation and win the experiment. For example, in an advertising experiment, a company wishes…
Cooperation and competition are fundamental forces shaping both natural and human systems, yet their interplay remains poorly understood. The Prisoner's Dilemma Game (PDG) has long served as a foundational framework in Game Theory for…
We introduce a quantitative approach to comparative statics that allows to bound the maximum effect of an exogenous parameter change on a system's equilibrium. The motivation for this approach is a well known paradox in multimarket Cournot…
This paper studies a setting in which multiple suppliers compete for a buyer's procurement business. The buyer faces uncertain demand and there is a requirement to reserve capacity in advance of knowing the demand. Each supplier has costs…
We study equilibria of markets with $m$ heterogeneous indivisible goods and $n$ consumers with combinatorial preferences. It is well known that a competitive equilibrium is not guaranteed to exist when valuations are not gross substitutes.…