Related papers: Restricting Entries to All-Pay Contests

We study competitive resource allocation problems in which players distribute their demands integrally on a set of resources subject to player-specific submodular capacity constraints. Each player has to pay for each unit of demand a cost…

Bidding in simultaneous auctions is challenging because an agent's value for a good in one auction may depend on the uncertain outcome of other auctions: the so-called exposure problem. Given the gap in understanding of general simultaneous…

Multi-agent policy-gradient methods have been shown to converge locally near stable Nash equilibria. Local convergence, however, does not determine which equilibrium is reached. We study this question through basin-entry probability with…

This article extends the idea of solving parity games by strategy iteration to non-deterministic strategies: In a non-deterministic strategy a player restricts himself to some non-empty subset of possible actions at a given node, instead of…

Aligning AI systems with human values remains a fundamental challenge, but does our inability to create perfectly aligned models preclude obtaining the benefits of alignment? We study a strategic setting where a human user interacts with…

Competitor rating systems for head-to-head games are typically used to measure playing strength from game outcomes. Ratings computed from these systems are often used to select top competitors for elite events, for pairing players of…

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…

We consider a dynamical approach to sequential games. By restricting the convertibility relation over strategy profiles, we obtain a semi-potential (in the sense of Kukushkin), and we show that in finite games the corresponding restriction…

Incentives are more likely to elicit desired outcomes when they are designed based on accurate models of agents' strategic behavior. A growing literature, however, suggests that people do not quite behave like standard economic agents in a…

In iterated games, a player can unilaterally exert influence over the outcome through a careful choice of strategy. A powerful class of such "payoff control" strategies was discovered by Press and Dyson (2012). Their so-called…

A valuation for a player in a game in extensive form is an assignment of numeric values to the players moves. The valuation reflects the desirability moves. We assume a myopic player, who chooses a move with the highest valuation.…

In many competitive settings, from education to politics, rules do not reward effort evenly, and thresholds (e.g., grade cutoffs or electoral majorities) make some moments disproportionately important. Success thus depends on efficiently…

Cooperative artificial intelligence with human or superhuman proficiency in collaborative tasks stands at the frontier of machine learning research. Prior work has tended to evaluate cooperative AI performance under the restrictive…

We introduce the class of pay or play games, which captures scenarios in which each decision maker is faced with a choice between two actions: one with a fixed payoff and an- other with a payoff dependent on others' selected actions. This…

This paper proposes an optimization algorithm based on how human fight and learn from each duelist. Since this algorithm is based on population, the proposed algorithm starts with an initial set of duelists. The duel is to determine the…

Resource allocation problems across multiple contests are ubiquitous in adversarial settings, from military operations to market competition. While Colonel Blotto and General Lotto games have provided valuable theoretical foundations for…

We study nondeterministic strategies in parity games with the aim of computing a most permissive winning strategy. Following earlier work, we measure permissiveness in terms of the average number/weight of transitions blocked by the…

This paper considers games where the utilities for agents are the sum of a term proportional to a social utility, and another term that is an individual cost or reward. The agents are assumed to be irrational in their perception of the…

In repeated games, cooperation is possible in equilibrium only if players are sufficiently patient, and long-term gains from cooperation outweigh short-term gains from deviation. What happens if the players have incomplete information…

We consider an example of stochastic games with partial, asymmetric and non-classical information. We obtain relevant equilibrium policies using a new approach which allows managing the belief updates in a structured manner. Agents have…