Related papers: Inside the West Wing: Lobbying as a contest

Strategic manipulation of elections is typically studied in the context of promoting individual candidates. In parliamentary elections, however, the focus shifts: voters may care more about the overall governing coalition than the…

We introduce a novel non-cooperative game to analyse opinion formation and resistance, incorporating principles from social psychology such as confirmation bias, resource constraints, and influence penalties. Our simulation features Large…

We consider an agent community wishing to decide on several binary issues by means of issue-by-issue majority voting. For each issue and each agent, one of the two options is better than the other. However, some of the agents may be…

Altruistic behaviour is disadvantageous for the individual while is advantageous for its group. If the target of the selection is the individual, one would expect the selection process to lead to populations formed by wholly homogeneous…

Goods and services -- public housing, medical appointments, schools -- are often allocated to individuals who rank them similarly but differ in their preference intensities. We characterize optimal allocation rules when individual…

This paper examines a government's strategic resource allocation choices when facing an opposing group whose military power is uncertain. We investigate how this uncertainty affects the government's decision to divide resources in a way…

A competitive market is modeled as a game of incomplete information. One player observes some payoff-relevant state and can sell (possibly noisy) messages thereof to the other, whose willingness to pay is contingent on their own beliefs. We…

Many networks do not live in isolation but are strongly interacting, with profound consequences on their dynamics. Here, we consider the case of two interacting social networks and, in the context of a simple model, we address the case of…

In certain parliamentary democracies, there are two major parties that move in and out of power every few elections, and a third minority party that essentially never governs. We present a simple model to account for this phenomenon, in…

Constructive election control considers the problem of an adversary who seeks to sway the outcome of an electoral process in order to ensure that their favored candidate wins. We consider the computational problem of constructive election…

A multi-level model of opinion formation is presented which takes into account that attitudes on different issues are usually not independent. In the model, agents exchange beliefs regarding a series of facts. A cognitive structure of…

The conflict between individual and collective interests is in the heart of every social dilemmas established by evolutionary game theory. We cannot avoid these conflicts but sometimes we may choose which interaction framework to use as a…

We consider the problem of how to regulate an oligopoly when firms have private information about their costs. In the environment, consumers make discrete choices over goods, and minimal structure is placed on the manner in which firms…

Firms' decisions to patent innovations involve a complex evaluation of costs, benefits, and strategic considerations. This article explores the economic and practical factors that influence whether companies seek patent protection. It…

We study investment strategy in different models of financial markets, where the investors cannot reach a perfect knowledge about available assets. The investor spends a certain effort to get information; this allows him to better choose…

Data buyers compete in a game of incomplete information about which a single data seller owns some payoff-relevant information. The seller faces a joint information- and mechanism-design problem: deciding which information to sell, while…

An evolving population, in which individual members (`agents') adapt their behaviour according to past experience, is of central importance to many disciplines. Because of their limited knowledge and capabilities, agents are forced to make…

Adversarial training aims to defend against adversaries: malicious opponents whose sole aim is to harm predictive performance in any way possible. This presents a rather harsh perspective, which we assert results in unnecessarily…

Presidential debates are viewed as providing an important public good by revealing information on candidates to voters. We consider an endogenous model of presidential debates in which an incumbent and a challenger (who is privately…

What role do non-elected bureaucrats play when elections provide imperfect accountability and create incentives for pandering? We develop a model where politicians and bureaucrats interact to implement policy. Both can either be good,…