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Related papers: Contest Design with Threshold Objectives

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Optimal control is an essential tool for stabilizing complex nonlinear systems. However, despite the extensive impacts of methods such as receding horizon control, dynamic programming and reinforcement learning, the design of cost functions…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-11-21 Tyler Westenbroek , Anand Siththaranjan , Mohsin Sarwari , Claire J. Tomlin , Shankar S. Sastry

In experimental applications of bounded-reasoning models, behavior is often summarized by distributions of "levels". We argue that such summaries conflate two conceptually distinct dimensions: a player's type, capturing beliefs about what…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-04-15 Shuige Liu , Gabriel Ziegler

We consider a contest game modelling a contest where reviews for $m$ proposals are crowdsourced from $n$ strategic agents} players. Player $i$ has a skill $s_{i\ell}$ for reviewing proposal $\ell$; for her review, she strategically chooses…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-05-17 Marios Mavronicolas , Paul G. Spirakis

An important objective in the development of targeted therapies is to identify the populations where the treatment under consideration has positive benefit risk balance. We consider pivotal clinical trials, where the efficacy of a treatment…

We consider clustering games in which the players are embedded in a network and want to coordinate (or anti-coordinate) their strategy with their neighbors. The goal of a player is to choose a strategy that maximizes her utility given the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2020-11-20 Pieter Kleer , Guido Schäfer

Motivated by recent progress on pricing in the AI literature, we study marketplaces that contain multiple vendors offering identical or similar products and unit-demand buyers with different valuations on these vendors. The objective of…

We revisit classic algorithmic search and optimization problems from the perspective of competition. Rather than a single optimizer minimizing expected cost, we consider a zero-sum game in which an optimization problem is presented to two…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2011-01-17 Nicole Immorlica , Adam Tauman Kalai , Brendan Lucier , Ankur Moitra , Andrew Postlewaite , Moshe Tennenholtz

Bayesian experimental design involves the optimal allocation of resources in an experiment, with the aim of optimising cost and performance. For implicit models, where the likelihood is intractable but sampling from the model is possible,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-02-26 Steven Kleinegesse , Michael Gutmann

To regulate a social system comprised of self-interested agents, economic incentives are often required to induce a desirable outcome. This incentive design problem naturally possesses a bilevel structure, in which a designer modifies the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-10-14 Boyi Liu , Jiayang Li , Zhuoran Yang , Hoi-To Wai , Mingyi Hong , Yu Marco Nie , Zhaoran Wang

Scheduling a sports tournament is a complex optimization problem, which requires a large number of hard constraints to satisfy. Despite the availability of several such constraints in the literature, there remains a gap since most of the…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2021-06-18 Syed Rameez Naqvi , Adnan Ahmad , S. M. Riazul Islam , Tallha Akram , M. Abdullah-Al-Wadud , Atif Alamri

Real-world engineering systems are typically compared and contrasted using multiple metrics. For practical machine learning systems, performance tuning is often more nuanced than minimizing a single expected loss objective, and it may be…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-12-19 Ian Dewancker , Michael McCourt , Samuel Ainsworth

A \emph{fair competition}, based on the concept of envy-freeness, is a non-eliminating competition where each contestant (team or individual player) may not play against all other contestants, but the total difficulty for each contestant is…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2021-02-09 Siddharth Gupta , Meirav Zehavi

We consider the problem of directly optimizing a non-linear function of an outcome, where this outcome itself is the sum of many small contributions. The non-linearity of the function means that the problem is not equivalent to the…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-09-04 Benjamin Heymann , Otmane Sakhi

In this paper, we study one-player and two-player energy mean-payoff games. Energy mean-payoff games are games of infinite duration played on a finite graph with edges labeled by 2-dimensional weight vectors. The objective of the first…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2019-07-03 Véronique Bruyère , Quentin Hautem , Mickael Randour , Jean-François Raskin

We study a mechanism-design problem in which spiteful agents strive to not only maximize their rewards but also, contingent upon their own payoff levels, seek to lower the opponents' rewards. We characterize all individually rational (IR)…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-12-02 Aditya Aradhye , David Lagziel , Eilon Solan

Reward design is a fundamental problem in reinforcement learning (RL). A misspecified or poorly designed reward can result in low sample efficiency and undesired behaviors. In this paper, we propose the idea of programmatic reward design,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-10 Weichao Zhou , Wenchao Li

Player ranking can be used to determine the quality of the contributions of a player to a collaborative community. However, collaborative games with no explicit objectives do not support player ranking, as there is no metric to measure the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2012-05-16 Luis Quesada , Pablo J. Villacorta

Judging scholarly posters creates a challenge to assign the judges efficiently. If there are many posters and few reviews per judge, the commonly used Balanced Incomplete Block Design is not a feasible option. An additional challenge is an…

Applications · Statistics 2018-06-04 Xiaoyue Niu , James L. Rosenberger

Most real-world optimization problems have multiple objectives. A system designer needs to find a policy that trades off these objectives to reach a desired operating point. This problem has been studied extensively in the setting of known…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-26 Nan Wang , Hongning Wang , Maryam Karimzadehgan , Branislav Kveton , Craig Boutilier

Decision trees have been studied extensively in the context of fairness, aiming to maximize prediction performance while ensuring non-discrimination against different groups. Techniques in this space usually focus on imposing constraints at…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-04 Kiara Stempel , Mattia Cerrato , Stefan Kramer