Related papers: Designing Simple Mechanisms
Many complex systems satisfy a set of constraints on their degrees of freedom, and at the same time, they are able to work and adapt to different conditions. Here, we describe the emergence of this ability in a simplified model in which the…
We study incentive design when multiple principals simultaneously design mechanisms for their respective teams in environments with strategic spillovers. In this environment, each principal's set of incentive-compatible mechanisms--those…
We model both concurrent programs and the possible executions from one state to another in a concurrent program using simplices. The latter are calculated using necklaces of simplices in the former.
We introduce the notion of fault tolerant mechanism design, which extends the standard game theoretic framework of mechanism design to allow for uncertainty about execution. Specifically, we define the problem of task allocation in which…
Engineering techniques to address the endless parade of security issues are an important area of research. Properties of practices in industrial use are rarely studied. Security workers satisfice. There is a widespread perception that…
We describe the design and implementation of a reasoning engine that facilitates the gamification of loop-invariant discovery. Our reasoning engine enables students, computational agents and regular software engineers with no formal methods…
We introduce three concepts that describe an agent's incentives: response incentives indicate which variables in the environment, such as sensitive demographic information, affect the decision under the optimal policy. Instrumental control…
Individuals have an intuitive perception of what makes a good coincidence. Though the sensitivity to coincidences has often been presented as resulting from an erroneous assessment of probability, it appears to be a genuine competence,…
This paper proposes a framework in which agents are constrained to use simple models to forecast economic variables and characterizes the resulting biases. It considers agents who can only entertain state-space models with no more than d…
We define the class of "simple recursive games". A simple recursive game is defined as a simple stochastic game (a notion due to Anne Condon), except that we allow arbitrary real payoffs but disallow moves of chance. We study the complexity…
Models of interacting social agents often represent agents as very simple entities having a small number of degrees of freedom, as exemplified by binary opinion models for instance. Understanding how such simple individual characteristics…
Modal logics are widely used in computer science. The complexity of their satisfiability problems has been an active field of research since the 1970s. We prove that even very "simple" modal logics can be undecidable: We show that there is…
As Machine Learning (ML) systems becomes more ubiquitous, ensuring the fair and equitable application of their underlying algorithms is of paramount importance. We argue that one way to achieve this is to proactively cultivate public…
Many definitions of business processes refer to business goals, value creation, or profits/gains of sorts. Nevertheless, the focus of formal methods research on business processes, like the well-known soundness property, lies on correctness…
Economies are complex man-made systems where organisms and markets interact according to motivations and principles not entirely understood yet. The increasing dissatisfaction with the postulates of traditional economics i.e. perfectly…
The relationship between topology and dynamics of complex systems has motivated continuing interest from the scientific community. In the present work, we address this interesting topic from the perspective of simple games, involving two…
It is typically expected that if a mechanism is truthful, then the agents would, indeed, truthfully report their private information. But why would an agent believe that the mechanism is truthful? We wish to design truthful mechanisms,…
We analyze the trade-off between model complexity and accuracy for random forests by breaking the trees up into individual classification rules and selecting a subset of them. We show experimentally that already a few rules are sufficient…
Common sense suggests that when individuals explain why they believe something, we can arrive at more accurate conclusions than when they simply state what they believe. Yet, there is no known mechanism that provides incentives to elicit…
I explain the shutdown problem: the problem of designing artificial agents that (1) shut down when a shutdown button is pressed, (2) don't try to prevent or cause the pressing of the shutdown button, and (3) otherwise pursue goals…