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

Models of auctions or tendering processes are introduced. In every round of bidding the players select their bid from a probability distribution and whenever a bid is unsuccessful, it is discarded and replaced. For simple models, the…

In an election, we are given a set of voters, each having a preference list over a set of candidates, that are distributed on a social network. We consider a scenario where voters may change their preference lists as a consequence of the…

Any community in which membership is optional may eventually break apart, or fork. For example, forks may occur in political parties, business partnerships, social groups, cryptocurrencies, and federated governing bodies. Forking is…

Individuals accepting an idea may intentionally or unintentionally impose influences in a certain neighborhood area, making other individuals within the area less likely or even impossible to accept other competing ideas. Depending on…

We model competition on a credence goods market governed by an imperfect label, signaling high quality, as a rank-order tournament between firms. In this market interaction, asymmetric firms jointly and competitively control the aggregate…

Many collective decision-making settings feature a strategic tension between agents acting out of individual self-interest and promoting a common good. These include wearing face masks during a pandemic, voting, and vaccination. Networked…

Complexity of voting manipulation is a prominent topic in computational social choice. In this work, we consider a two-stage voting manipulation scenario. First, a malicious party (an attacker) attempts to manipulate the election outcome in…

A monopolist offers personalized prices to consumers with unit demand, heterogeneous values, and idiosyncratic costs, who differ in a protected characteristic, such as race or gender. The seller is subject to a non-discrimination…

In this work, we are interested on the analysis of competing marketing campaigns between an incumbent who dominates the market and a challenger who wants to enter the market. We are interested in (a) the simultaneous decision of how many…

We expect that democracy enables us to utilize collective intelligence such that our collective decisions build and enhance social welfare, and such that we accept their distributive and normative consequences. Collective decisions are…

A discourse strategy is a strategy for communicating with another agent. Designing effective dialogue systems requires designing agents that can choose among discourse strategies. We claim that the design of effective strategies must take…

A policymaker often wants to steer a decision-maker toward one of two actions, but lacks reliable knowledge of how the decision-maker perceives uncertainty or evaluates risk. We formalize a notion of robust paternalism: a modification a' of…

In today's dynamic and interconnected world, resource constraints pose significant challenges across various domains, ranging from networks, logistics and manufacturing to project management and optimization, etc. Resource-constrained…

I study the optimal voting mechanism for a committee that must decide whether to enact or block a policy of unknown benefit. Information can come both from committee members who can acquire it at cost, and a strategic lobbyist who wishes…

Financial markets are subject to long periods of polarized behavior, such as bull-market or bear-market phases, in which the vast majority of market participants seem to almost exclusively choose one action (between buying or selling) over…

Tanking, the act of deliberately dropping points or losing a game in order to gain some other advantage, is usually seen as being against the spirit of sports. It can be even more serious if playing a draw is a (weakly) dominant strategy…

Most theoretical definitions about the complexity of manipulating elections focus on the decision problem of recognizing which instances can be successfully manipulated, rather than the search problem of finding the successful manipulative…

Decisions in a shareholder meeting or a legislative committee are often modeled as a weighted game. Influence of a member is then measured by a power index. A large variety of different indices has been introduced in the literature. This…

We analyze conflict between a citizenry and an insurgent group over a fixed resource such as land. The citizenry has an elected leader who proposes a division such that, the lower the land ceded to the insurgents, the higher the cost of…

We examine the effects of introducing a political outsider to the nomination process leading to an election. To this end, we develop a sequential game where politicians -- insiders and outsiders -- make a platform offer to a party, and…