Related papers: Submission Fees in Risk-Taking Contests

The problem of optimal switching between nonlinear autonomous subsystems is investigated in this study where the objective is not only bringing the states to close to the desired point, but also adjusting the switching pattern, in the sense…

We consider the situation in which an organizer is trying to convene an event, and needs to choose a subset of agents to be invited. Agents have preferences over how many attendees should be at the event and possibly also who the attendees…

When funding public goods, resources are often allocated via mechanisms that resemble contests, especially in the case of research grants. A common critique of these contests is that they induce ``too much'' effort from participants. This…

We consider an exchange who wishes to set suitable make-take fees to attract liquidity on its platform. Using a principal-agent approach, we are able to describe in quasi-explicit form the optimal contract to propose to a market maker. This…

We study the problem of learning classifiers with a fairness constraint, with three main contributions towards the goal of quantifying the problem's inherent tradeoffs. First, we relate two existing fairness measures to cost-sensitive…

Institutions and investors face the constant challenge of making accurate decisions and predictions regarding how best they should distribute their endowments. The problem of achieving an optimal outcome at minimal cost has been extensively…

We consider collaborative systems where users make contributions across multiple available projects and are rewarded for their contributions in individual projects according to a local sharing of the value produced. This serves as a model…

We study a contest in which $N$ players sequentially draw from a distribution as many times as they want at a fixed cost per draw, with no recall, and the highest accepted value wins a prize. In the unique symmetric equilibrium, the…

We study the design of an auction for an income-generating asset such as an intellectual property license. Each bidder has a signal about his future income from acquiring the asset. After the asset is allocated, the winner's income from the…

Postselection is the process of discarding outcomes from statistical trials that are not the event one desires. Postselection can be useful in many applications where the cost of getting the wrong event is implicitly high. However, unless…

We consider an online preemptive scheduling problem where jobs with deadlines arrive sporadically. A commitment requirement is imposed such that the scheduler has to either accept or decline a job immediately upon arrival. The scheduler's…

We study contests where the designer's objective is an extension of the widely studied objective of maximizing the total output: The designer gets zero marginal utility from a player's output if the output of the player is very low or very…

This paper considers a distributed stochastic optimization problem where the goal is to minimize the time average of a cost function subject to a set of constraints on the time averages of a related stochastic processes called penalties. We…

We study buyer-optimal procurement mechanisms when quality is contractible. When some costs are borne by every participant of a procurement auction regardless of winning, the classic analysis should be amended. We show that an optimal…

In this paper, we study a new stochastic submodular maximization problem with state-dependent costs and rejections. The input of our problem is a budget constraint $B$, and a set of items whose states (i.e., the marginal contribution and…

Scientific research funding is allocated largely through a system of soliciting and ranking competitive grant proposals. In these competitions, the proposals themselves are not the deliverables that the funder seeks, but instead are used by…

We consider the problem of designing risk-sensitive optimal control policies for scheduling packet transmissions in a stochastic wireless network. A single client is connected to an access point (AP) through a wireless channel. Packet…

We study mechanisms for selling a single item when buyers have private costs for participating in the mechanism. An agent's participation cost can also be interpreted as an outside option value that she must forego to participate. This…

Stochastic matching is the stochastic version of the well-known matching problem, which consists in maximizing the rewards of a matching under a set of probability distributions associated with the nodes and edges. In most stochastic…

In reinforcement learning episodes, the rewards and punishments are often non-deterministic, and there are invariably stochastic elements governing the underlying situation. Such stochastic elements are often numerous and cannot be known in…