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Maximal (also miner) extractable value, or MEV, usually refers to the value that privileged players can extract by strategically ordering, censoring, and placing transactions in a blockchain. Each blockchain network, which we refer to as a…
Many protocols in distributed computing rely on a source of randomness, usually called a random beacon, both for their applicability and security. This is especially true for proof-of-stake blockchain protocols in which the next miner or…
All public blockchains are secured by a proof of opportunity cost among block producers. For example, the security offered by proof-of-work (PoW) systems, like Bitcoin, is due to spent computation; it is work precisely because it cannot be…
The development Open Source Software fundamentally depends on the participation and commitment of volunteer developers to progress. Several works have presented strategies to increase the on-boarding and engagement of new contributors, but…
Blockchains have sparked global interest in recent years, gaining importance as they increasingly influence technology and finance. This thesis investigates the robustness of blockchain protocols, specifically focusing on Ethereum…
Reward allocation, also known as the credit assignment problem, has been an important topic in economics, engineering, and machine learning. An important concept in reward allocation is the core, which is the set of stable allocations where…
In this paper, we investigate a supply chain network with a supplier and multiple retailers. The supplier can either take orders from retailers directly, or choose to build a warehouse somewhere in the network to centralize the ordering…
Proof-of-Stake blockchains based on a longest-chain consensus protocol are an attractive energy-friendly alternative to the Proof-of-Work paradigm. However, formal barriers to "getting the incentives right" were recently discovered, driven…
In mechanism design it is typical to impose incentive compatibility and then derive an optimal mechanism subject to this constraint. By replacing the incentive compatibility requirement with the goal of minimizing expected ex post regret,…
The Schelling model of segregation was introduced in economics to show how micro-motives can influence macro-behavior. Agents on a lattice have two colors and try to move to a different location if the number of their neighbors with a…
Blockchains rely on economic incentives to ensure secure and decentralised operation, making incentive compatibility a core design concern. However, protocols are rarely deployed in isolation. Applications interact with the underlying…
A principal uses payments conditioned on stochastic outcomes of a team project to elicit costly effort from the team members. We develop a multi-agent generalization of a classic first-order approach to contract optimization by leveraging…
Renewable resources are starting to constitute a growing portion of the total generation mix of the power system. A key difference between renewables and traditional generators is that many renewable resources are managed by individuals,…
Blockchain has many benefits including decentralization, availability, persistency, consistency, anonymity, auditability and accountability, and it also covers a wide spectrum of applications ranging from cryptocurrency, financial services,…
Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) is value extractable by temporary monopoly power commonly found in decentralized systems. This extraction stems from a lack of user privacy upon transaction submission and the ability of a monopolist…
In blockchain networks, the strategic ordering of transactions within blocks has emerged as a significant source of profit extraction, known as Maximal Extractable Value (MEV). The transition from spam-based Priority Gas Auctions to…
Blockchain systems, such as Ethereum, are increasingly adopting layer-2 scaling solutions to improve transaction throughput and reduce fees. One popular layer-2 approach is the Optimistic Rollup, which relies on a mechanism known as a…
Machine learning has recently enabled large advances in artificial intelligence, but these results can be highly centralized. The large datasets required are generally proprietary; predictions are often sold on a per-query basis; and…
We study efficiency in a proof-of-work blockchain with non-zero latencies, focusing in particular on the (inequality in) individual miners' efficiencies. Prior work attributed differences in miners' efficiencies mostly to attacks, but we…
We seek to understand when heterogeneity in user preferences yields improved outcomes in terms of overall cost. That this might be hoped for is based on the common belief that diversity is advantageous in many settings. We investigate this…