Related papers: Contest Design with Threshold Objectives
This paper investigates a two-stage game-theoretical model with multiple parallel rank-order contests. In this model, each contest designer sets up a contest and determines the prize structure within a fixed budget in the first stage.…
We study $n$-dimensional contests between two players with heterogeneous effort costs, where each dimension (battle) is modeled as a Tullock contest. Prize-allocation rules are identity-independent, budget-balanced, and weakly increasing in…
We study how individuals trade off outcome ("what") and process ("how") utility in high-stakes strategic decisions, namely professional tennis. Using optimality conditions and the second-service rule, we derive a sufficient condition for…
People, robots, and companies mostly divide time and effort among projects, and \defined{shared effort games} model people investing resources in public endeavors and sharing the generated values. In linear $\theta$ sharing (effort) games,…
We typically construct optimal designs based on a single objective function. To better capture the breadth of an experiment's goals, we could instead construct a multiple objective optimal design based on multiple objective functions. While…
Shortlisting is a common and effective method for pre-selecting participants in competitive settings. To ensure fairness, a cut-off score is typically announced, allowing only contestants who exceed it to enter the contest, while others are…
This paper explores the design of contests involving $n$ contestants, focusing on how the designer decides on the number of contestants allowed and the prize structure with a fixed budget. We characterize the unique symmetric Bayesian Nash…
In applied game theory the motivation of players is a key element. It is encoded in the payoffs of the game form and often based on utility functions. But there are cases were formal descriptions in the form of a utility function do not…
In a two-player zero-sum graph game, the players move a token throughout a graph to produce an infinite play, which determines the winner of the game. Bidding games are graph games in which in each turn, an auction (bidding) determines…
Mechanism design is a well-established game-theoretic paradigm for designing games to achieve desired outcomes. This paper addresses a closely related but distinct concept, equilibrium design. Unlike mechanism design, the designer's…
In the contest design problem, there are $n$ strategic contestants, each of whom decides an effort level. A contest designer with a fixed budget must then design a mechanism that allocates a prize $p_i$ to the $i$-th rank based on the…
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…
Selective contests can impair participants' overall welfare in overcompetitive environments, such as school admissions. This paper models the situation as an optimal contest design problem with binary actions, treating effort costs as…
In dynamic noncooperative games, each player makes conjectures about other players' reactions before choosing a strategy. However, resulting equilibria may be multiple and do not always lead to desirable outcomes. These issues are typically…
We investigate zero-sum turn-based two-player stochastic games in which the objective of one player is to maximize the amount of rewards obtained during a play, while the other aims at minimizing it. We focus on games in which the minimizer…
A \emph{bidding} game is played on a graph as follows. A token is placed on an initial vertex and both players are allocated budgets. In each turn, the players simultaneously submit bids that do not exceed their available budgets, the…
Mechanisms such as auctions and pricing schemes are utilized to design strategic (noncooperative) games for networked systems. Although the participating players are selfish, these mechanisms ensure that the game outcome is optimal with…
I study optimal disclosure policies in sequential contests. A contest designer chooses at which periods to publicly disclose the efforts of previous contestants. I provide results for a wide range of possible objectives for the contest…
Objective: The study investigates the effect on cooperation in multiplayer games, when the population from which all individuals are drawn is structured - i.e. when a given individual is only competing with a small subset of the entire…
This paper investigates design of noncooperative games from an optimization and control theoretic perspective. Pricing mechanisms are used as a design tool to ensure that the Nash equilibrium of a fairly general class of noncooperative…