Related papers: Restricting Entries to All-Pay Contests

Winners-take-all situations introduce an incentive for agents to diversify their behavior, since doing so will result in splitting an eventual price with fewer people. At the same time, when the payoff of a process depends on a parameter…

We study a tractable two-player contest built on a truncated cubic contest success function. Its defining feature is a strategic-feedback parameter whose sign determines whether a leading player's effort lowers (suppression) or raises…

We address the equilibrium concept of a reverse auction game so that no one can enhance the individual payoff by a unilateral change when all the others follow a certain strategy. In this approach the combinatorial possibilities to consider…

In this paper we introduce and study {\em all-pay bidding games}, a class of two player, zero-sum games on graphs. The game proceeds as follows. We place a token on some vertex in the graph and assign budgets to the two players. Each turn,…

We study a general scenario of simultaneous contests that allocate prizes based on equal sharing: each contest awards its prize to all players who satisfy some contest-specific criterion, and the value of this prize to a winner decreases as…

The Adjusted Winner (AW) method is a fundamental procedure for the fair division of indivisible resources between two agents. However, its reliance on splitting resources can lead to practical complications. To address this limitation, we…

This note pursues two primary objectives. First, we analyze the outcomes of an all-pay auction within a store where buyers with and without financial constraints arrive at varying rates, and where buyer types are private information.…

An extensive literature in economics and social science addresses contests, in which players compete to outperform each other on some measurable criterion, often referred to as a player's score, or output. Players incur costs that are an…

Symmetry is inherent in the definition of most of the two-player zero-sum games, including parity, mean-payoff, and discounted-payoff games. It is therefore quite surprising that no symmetric analysis techniques for these games exist. We…

Network congestion games are a well-understood model of multi-agent strategic interactions. Despite their ubiquitous applications, it is not clear whether it is possible to design information structures to ameliorate the overall experience…

This paper considers a two-player game where each player chooses a resource from a finite collection of options. Each resource brings a random reward. Both players have statistical information regarding the rewards of each resource.…

Understanding the convergence landscape of multi-agent learning is a fundamental problem of great practical relevance in many applications of artificial intelligence and machine learning. While it is known that learning dynamics converge to…

Richman games are zero-sum games, where in each turn players bid in order to determine who will play next [Lazarus et al.'99]. We extend the theory to impartial general-sum two player games called \emph{bidding games}, showing the existence…

Consider a 2-player normal-form game repeated over time. We introduce an adaptive learning procedure, where the players only observe their own realized payoff at each stage. We assume that agents do not know their own payoff function, and…

In lowest unique bid auctions, $N$ players bid for an item. The winner is whoever places the \emph{lowest} bid, provided that it is also unique. We use a grand canonical approach to derive an analytical expression for the equilibrium…

We present an algorithm for computing pure-strategy epsilon-perfect Bayesian equilibria in sequential auctions with continuous action and value spaces. Importantly, our algorithm includes a verification phase that computes an upper bound on…

We study the design of effort-maximizing grading schemes between agents with private abilities. Assuming agents derive value from the information their grade reveals about their ability, we find that more informative grading schemes induce…

A multi-player competitive Dynkin stopping game is constructed. Each player can either exit the game for a fixed payoff, determined a priori, or stay and receive an adjusted payoff depending on the decision of other players. The single…

We consider a nonzero-sum N-player Markov game on an abstract measurable state space with compact metric action spaces. The payoff functions are bounded Carath\'eodory functions and the transitions of the system are assumed to have a…

We consider a tournament among four equally strong semifinalists. The players have to decide how much stamina to use in the semifinals, provided that the rest is available in the final and the third-place playoff. We investigate optimal…