Related papers: Submission Fees in Risk-Taking Contests

Deciding which idea is worth prototyping is a central concern in iterative design. A prototype should be produced when the expected improvement is high and the cost is low. However, this is hard to decide, because costs can vary…

We consider a strategic game, where players submit jobs to a machine that executes all jobs in a way that minimizes energy while respecting the given deadlines. The energy consumption is then charged to the players in some way. Each player…

In computing, as in many aspects of life, changes incur cost. Many optimization problems are formulated as a one-time instance starting from scratch. However, a common case that arises is when we already have a set of prior assignments, and…

We consider a non-stationary variant of a sequential stochastic optimization problem, in which the underlying cost functions may change along the horizon. We propose a measure, termed variation budget, that controls the extent of said…

This paper studies a dynamic screening model in which a principal hires an agent with limited liability. The agent's private cost of working is an i.i.d. draw from a continuous distribution. His working status is publicly observable. The…

This research focuses on the bid optimization problem in the real-time bidding setting for online display advertisements, where an advertiser, or the advertiser's agent, has access to the features of the website visitor and the type of ad…

Recently, machine learning algorithms have successfully entered large-scale real-world industrial applications (e.g. search engines and email spam filters). Here, the CPU cost during test time must be budgeted and accounted for. In this…

This paper investigates the incentive mechanism design from a novel and practically important perspective in which mobile users as contributors do not join simultaneously and a requester desires large efforts from early contributors. A…

In this paper, we develop a new method for finding an optimal biddingstrategy in sequential auctions, using a dynamic programming technique. Theexisting method assumes that the utility of a user is represented in anadditive form. Thus, the…

As the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in high-stakes decision-making increases, the ability to contest such decisions is being recognised in AI ethics guidelines as an important safeguard for individuals. Yet, there is little guidance…

We study variants of a stochastic game inspired by backgammon where players may propose to double the stake, with the game state dictated by a one-dimensional random walk. Our variants allow for different numbers of proposals and different…

Internet advertising is a sophisticated game in which the many advertisers "play" to optimize their return on investment. There are many "targets" for the advertisements, and each "target" has a collection of games with a potentially…

This paper studies a discrete-time optimal switching problem on a finite horizon. The underlying model has a running reward, terminal reward and signed (positive and negative) switching costs. Using the martingale approach to optimal…

Peer prediction mechanisms are often adopted to elicit truthful contributions from crowd workers when no ground-truth verification is available. Recently, mechanisms of this type have been developed to incentivize effort exertion, in…

This paper explores a novel way for analyzing the tournament structures to find a best suitable one for the tournament under consideration. It concerns about three aspects such as tournament conducting cost, competitiveness development and…

We derive a revenue-maximizing scheme that charges customers who are homogeneous with respect to their waiting cost parameter for a random fee in order to become premium customers. This scheme incentivizes all customers to purchase…

We consider a two-road dynamic routing game where the state of one of the roads (the "risky road") is stochastic and may change over time. This generates room for experimentation. A central planner may wish to induce some of the (finite…

We consider online procurement auctions, where the agents arrive sequentially, in random order, and have private costs for their services. The buyer aims to maximize a monotone submodular value function for the subset of agents whose…

This paper considers the maximization of the expected maximum value of a portfolio of random variables subject to a budget constraint. We refer to this as the optimal college application problem. When each variable's cost, or each college's…

In the online simple knapsack problem items are presented in an iterative fashion and an algorithm has to decide for each item whether to reject or permanently include it into the knapsack without any knowledge about the rest of the…