Related papers: Comparative Patience
We study the classic divide-and-choose method for equitably allocating divisible goods between two players who are rational, self-interested Bayesian agents. The players have additive values for the goods. The prior distributions on those…
Inspired by applications in sports where the skill of players or teams competing against each other varies over time, we propose a probabilistic model of pairwise-comparison outcomes that can capture a wide range of time dynamics. We…
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…
Competitive interactions represent one of the driving forces behind evolution and natural selection in biological and sociological systems. For example, animals in an ecosystem may vie for food or mates; in a market economy, firms may…
I study sequential contests where the efforts of earlier players may be disclosed to later players by nature or by design. The model has a range of applications, including rent seeking, R&D, oligopoly, public goods provision, and tragedy of…
Many applications, e.g., Web service composition, complex system design, team formation, etc., rely on methods for identifying collections of objects or entities satisfying some functional requirement. Among the collections that satisfy the…
We define a novel neuro-symbolic framework, argumentative reward learning, which combines preference-based argumentation with existing approaches to reinforcement learning from human feedback. Our method improves prior work by generalising…
New fairness notions aligned with the merit principle are proposed for designing exchange rules. We show that for an obviously strategy-proof, efficient and individually rational rule, (i) an agent receives her favorite object when others…
Cooperative game theory studies how to allocate the joint value generated by a set of players. These games are typically analyzed using the characteristic function form with transferable utility, which represents the value attainable by…
A possibly immortal agent tries to maximise its summed discounted rewards over time, where discounting is used to avoid infinite utilities and encourage the agent to value current rewards more than future ones. Some commonly used discount…
In sorting literature, comparative statics for multidimensional assignment models with general output functions and input distributions is an important open question. We provide a complete theory of comparative statics for technological…
Rewards typically express desirabilities or preferences over a set of alternatives. Here we propose that rewards can be defined for any probability distribution based on three desiderata, namely that rewards should be real-valued, additive…
Interactive preference elicitation (IPE) aims to substantially reduce human effort while acquiring human preferences in wide personalization systems. Dueling bandit (DB) algorithms enable optimal decision-making in IPE building on pairwise…
We propose a set of conservative models in which agents exchange wealth with a preference in the choice of interacting agents in different ways. The common feature in all the models is that the temporary values of financial status of agents…
We study the question of setting and testing reserve prices in single item auctions when the bidders are not identical. At a high level, there are two generalizations of the standard second price auction: in the lazy version we first…
We prove that a first-order cooperative system of interacting agents converges to consensus if the so-called Persistence Excitation condition holds. This condition requires that the interaction function between any pair of agents satisfies…
In financial applications, latency advantages -- the ability to make decisions later than others, even without the ability to see what others have done -- can provide individual participants with an edge by allowing them to gather…
How do competing populations convert a spatial advantage into macroscopic dominance? We introduce a stochastic model for resource competition that decouples the transient discovery phase from monopolization. Initial symmetry breaking is…
In the persuasion model, apart from a few special cases, comparative statics has been an open question. We answer it, delineating which shifts of the sender's interim payoff lead her optimally to choose a more informative signal. Our first…
Agent-based modeling is a computational dynamic modeling technique that may be less familiar to some readers. Agent-based modeling seeks to understand the behaviour of complex systems by situating agents in an environment and studying the…