Related papers: Contest Design with Threshold Objectives

Tie-breaker designs trade off a statistical design objective with short-term gain from preferentially assigning a binary treatment to those with high values of a running variable $x$. The design objective is any continuous function of the…

In a multi-battle contest, each time a player competes by investing some of her budgets or resources in a component battle to collect a value if winning the battle. There are multiple battles to fight, and the budgets get consumed over…

How to efficiently design a communication network is a paramount task for network designing and engineering. It is, however, not a single objective optimization process as perceived by most previous researches, i.e., to maximize its…

We study Bayesian mechanism design problems in settings where agents have budgets. Specifically, an agent's utility for an outcome is given by his value for the outcome minus any payment he makes to the mechanism, as long as the payment is…

We present a framework for designing scores to summarize performance metrics. Our design has two multi-criteria objectives: (1) improving on scores should improve all performance metrics, and (2) achieving pareto-optimal scores should…

We study the game redesign problem in which an external designer has the ability to change the payoff function in each round, but incurs a design cost for deviating from the original game. The players apply no-regret learning algorithms to…

We consider an online version of the well-studied network utility maximization problem, where users arrive one by one and an operator makes irrevocable decisions for each user without knowing the details of future arrivals. We propose a…

The efficient design of networks has been an important engineering task that involves challenging combinatorial optimization problems. Typically, a network designer has to select among several alternatives which links to establish so that…

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…

In many social computing applications such as online Q&A forums, the best contribution for each task receives some high reward, while all remaining contributions receive an identical, lower reward irrespective of their actual qualities.…

In games with a large number of players where players may have overlapping objectives, the analysis of stable outcomes typically depends on player types. A special case is when a large part of the player population consists of imitation…

The efficiency of a game is typically quantified by the price of anarchy (PoA), defined as the worst ratio of the objective function value of an equilibrium --- solution of the game --- and that of an optimal outcome. Given the tremendous…

We study stochastic two-player turn-based games in which the objective of one player is to ensure several infinite-horizon total reward objectives, while the other player attempts to spoil at least one of the objectives. The games have…

We address the problem of improving bidders' strategies in prior-dependent revenue-maximizing auctions and introduce a simple and generic method to design novel bidding strategies if the seller uses past bids to optimize her mechanism. We…

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…

Existing multi-outcome designs focus almost entirely on evaluating whether all outcomes show evidence of efficacy or whether at least one outcome shows evidence of efficacy. While a small number of authors have provided multi-outcome…

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…

In competitive resource allocation, a central coordinator may seek to gain an advantage not by directly controlling subordinate agents, but by strategically manipulating the information they receive. We study this problem within the…

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…

Stochastic two-player games model systems with an environment that is both adversarial and stochastic. The adversarial part of the environment is modeled by a player (Player 2) who tries to prevent the system (Player 1) from achieving its…