Related papers: Submission Fees in Risk-Taking Contests
The cost of stochastic resetting is considered within the context of a discrete random walk model. In addition to standard stochastic resetting, for which a reset occurs with a certain probability after \emph{each} step, we introduce a…
We study competition among contests in a general model that allows for an arbitrary and heterogeneous space of contest design, where the goal of the contest designers is to maximize the contestants' sum of efforts. Our main result shows…
We study how a platform should design early exposure and rewards when creators strategically choose quality before release. A short testing window with a pass/fail bar induces a pass probability, the slope of which is the key sufficient…
Many applications require the collection of data on different variables or measurements over many system performance metrics. We term those broadly as measures or variables. Often data collection along each measure incurs a cost, thus it is…
We consider an outsourcing problem where a software agent procures multiple services from providers with uncertain reliabilities to complete a computational task before a strict deadline. The service consumer requires a procurement strategy…
The mean completion time of a stochastic process may be rendered finite and minimised by a judiciously chosen restart protocol, which may either be stochastic or deterministic. Here we study analytically an arbitrary stochastic search…
In this paper we consider a scenario where there are several algorithms for solving a given problem. Each algorithm is associated with a probability of success and a cost, and there is also a penalty for failing to solve the problem. The…
Given a batch of human computation tasks, a commonly ignored aspect is how the price (i.e., the reward paid to human workers) of these tasks must be set or varied in order to meet latency or cost constraints. Often, the price is set…
In this work, we study a single-machine scheduling problem that aims at minimizing the total cost of a schedule subject to start-time dependent costs. This framework naturally captures scenarios where costs fluctuate throughout the day,…
We study the design of optimal incentives in sequential processes. To do so, we consider a basic and fundamental model in which an agent initiates a value-creating sequential process through costly investment with random success. If…
We introduce a dynamic mechanism design problem in which the designer wants to offer for sale an item to an agent, and another item to the same agent at some point in the future. The agent's joint distribution of valuations for the two…
We study the optimal allocation of prizes in rank-order tournaments with loss averse agents. Prize sharing becomes increasingly optimal with loss aversion because more equitable prizes reduce the marginal psychological cost of anticipated…
A principal uses payments conditioned on stochastic outcomes of a team project to elicit costly effort from the team members. We develop a multi-agent generalization of a classic first-order approach to contract optimization by leveraging…
A speculative agent with Prospect Theory preference chooses the optimal time to purchase and then to sell an indivisible risky asset to maximize the expected utility of the round-trip profit net of transaction costs. The optimization…
In science as elsewhere, attention is a limited resource and scientists compete with one another to produce the most exciting, novel and impactful results. We develop a game-theoretic model to explore how such competition influences the…
In match race sailing, competitors must steer their boats upwind in the presence of unpredictably evolving weather. Combined with the tacking motion necessary to make upwind progress, this makes it natural to model their path-planning as a…
We consider a sequential decision-making problem where an agent can take one action at a time and each action has a stochastic temporal extent, i.e., a new action cannot be taken until the previous one is finished. Upon completion, the…
We describe a new coordination mechanism for non-atomic congestion games that leads to a (selfish) social cost which is arbitrarily close to the non-selfish optimal. This mechanism does not incur any additional extra cost, like tolls, which…
What is the optimal order in which a researcher should submit their papers to journals of differing quality? I analyze a sequential search model without recall where the researcher's expected value from journal submission depends on the…
The determination of acceptability prices of contingent claims requires the choice of a stochastic model for the underlying asset price dynamics. Given this model, optimal bid and ask prices can be found by stochastic optimization. However,…