Related papers: Safe Pareto Improvements for Expected Utility Maxi…
We examine normal-form games in which players may \emph{pre-commit} to outcome-contingent transfers before choosing their actions. In the one-shot version of this model, Jackson and Wilkie showed that side contracting can backfire: even a…
The reliability and security of a user in an interconnected system depends on all users' collective effort in security. Consequently, investments in security technologies by strategic users is typically modeled as a public good problem,…
Due to the lack of coordination, it is unlikely that the selfish players of a strategic game reach a socially good state. A possible way to cope with selfishness is to compute a desired outcome (if it is tractable) and impose it. However…
An inconsistent knowledge base can be abstracted as a set of arguments and a defeat relation among them. There can be more than one consistent way to evaluate such an argumentation graph. Collective argument evaluation is the problem of…
Game theoretic approaches have gained traction as robust methodologies for designing distributed local algorithms that induce a desired overall system configuration in multi-agent settings. However, much of the emphasis in these approaches…
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…
Malicious softwares or malwares for short have become a major security threat. While originating in criminal behavior, their impact are also influenced by the decisions of legitimate end users. Getting agents in the Internet, and in…
An informed Advisor and an uninformed Decision-Maker, with conflicting interests, engage in repeated cheap talk communication in always new decision problems. While the Decision-Maker's optimal payoff is attainable in some subgame-perfect…
Reallocating resources to get mutually beneficial outcomes is a fundamental problem in various multi-agent settings. While finding an arbitrary Pareto optimal allocation is generally easy, checking whether a particular allocation is Pareto…
As electricity consumption grows, reducing peak demand--the maximum load on the grid--has become critical for preventing infrastructure strain and blackouts. Pricing mechanisms that incentivize consumers with flexible loads to shift…
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…
In a multi-objective game, each individual's payoff is a \emph{vector-valued} function of everyone's actions. Under such vectorial payoffs, Pareto-efficiency is used to formulate each individual's best-response condition, inducing…
We study a decentralized matching market in which firms sequentially make offers to potential workers. For each offer, the worker can choose "accept" or "reject," but the decision is irrevocable. The acceptance of an offer guarantees her…
Safe policy improvement (SPI) is an offline reinforcement learning problem in which a new policy that reliably outperforms the behavior policy with high confidence needs to be computed using only a dataset and the behavior policy. Markov…
We study games with incomplete information and characterize when a feasible outcome is Pareto efficient. Outcomes with excessive randomization are inefficient: generically, the total number of action profiles across states must be strictly…
This paper approaches the problem of understanding collective agency from a logical and game-theoretical perspective. Instead of collective intentionality, our analysis highlights the role of Pareto optimality. To facilitate the analysis,…
We study repeated two-player games where one of the players, the learner, employs a no-regret learning strategy, while the other, the optimizer, is a rational utility maximizer. We consider general Bayesian games, where the payoffs of both…
The standard game-theoretic solution concept, Nash equilibrium, assumes that all players behave rationally. If we follow a Nash equilibrium and opponents are irrational (or follow strategies from a different Nash equilibrium), then we may…
Noncooperative game-theoretic tools have been increasingly used to study many important resource allocation problems in communications, networking, smart grids, and portfolio optimization. In this paper, we consider a general class of…
In this paper, we introduce a game theoretic framework for studying the problem of minimizing the completion time of instantly decodable network coding (IDNC) for cooperative data exchange (CDE) in decentralized wireless network. In this…