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We study allocation mechanisms that utilize costly signaling as a screening tool. A social planner aims to maximize social welfare, defined as the weighted sum of agents' utilities, while implementing a specific allocation rule. Within a…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-03-04 Yingkai Li , Xiaoyun Qiu

Combinatorial Auctions are a central problem in Algorithmic Mechanism Design: pricing and allocating goods to buyers with complex preferences in order to maximize some desired objective (e.g., social welfare, revenue, or profit). The…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2015-03-19 Avrim Blum , Anupam Gupta , Yishay Mansour , Ankit Sharma

Shortlisting is a common and effective method for pre-selecting participants in competitive settings. To ensure fairness, a cut-off score is typically announced, allowing only contestants who exceed it to enter the contest, while others are…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Hanbing Liu , Ningyuan Li , Weian Li , Qi Qi , Changyuan Yu

Institutions and investors face the constant challenge of making accurate decisions and predictions regarding how best they should distribute their endowments. The problem of achieving an optimal outcome at minimal cost has been extensively…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2021-02-09 Theodor Cimpeanu , Cedric Perret , The Anh Han

Optimization models generally aim for efficiency by maximizing total benefit or minimizing cost. Yet a trade-off between fairness and efficiency is an important element of many practical decisions. We propose a principled and practical…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-06-11 Violet Xinying Chen , J. N. Hooker

This research considers the ranking and selection (R&S) problem of selecting the optimal subset from a finite set of alternative designs. Given the total simulation budget constraint, we aim to maximize the probability of correctly…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-04-25 Fei Gao , Zhongshun Shi , Siyang Gao , Hui Xiao

In competitive resource allocation, a central coordinator may seek to gain an advantage not by directly controlling subordinate agents, but by strategically manipulating the information they receive. We study this problem within the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Gilberto Diaz-Garcia , Keith Paarporn , Jason R. Marden

Understanding the bias-variance tradeoff in user representation learning is essential for improving recommendation quality in modern content platforms. While well studied in static settings, this tradeoff becomes significantly more complex…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Kang Wang , Renzhe Xu , Bo Li

The application of incentives, such as reward and punishment, is a frequently applied way for promoting cooperation among interacting individuals in structured populations. However, how to properly use the incentives is still a challenging…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-04-24 Shengxian Wang , Xiaojie Chen , Zhilong Xiao , Attila Szolnoki , Vítor V. Vasconcelos

We introduce draft auctions, which is a sequential auction format where at each iteration players bid for the right to buy items at a fixed price. We show that draft auctions offer an exponential improvement in social welfare at equilibrium…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2013-11-13 Nikhil R. Devanur , Jamie Morgenstern , Vasilis Syrgkanis

Scientific research funding is allocated largely through a system of soliciting and ranking competitive grant proposals. In these competitions, the proposals themselves are not the deliverables that the funder seeks, but instead are used by…

Physics and Society · Physics 2019-01-04 Kevin Gross , Carl T. Bergstrom

We study a temporal voting model where voters have dynamic preferences over a set of public chores -- projects that benefit society, but impose individual costs on those affected by their implementation. We investigate the computational…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-08-13 Edith Elkind , Tzeh Yuan Neoh , Nicholas Teh

To regulate a social system comprised of self-interested agents, economic incentives are often required to induce a desirable outcome. This incentive design problem naturally possesses a bilevel structure, in which a designer modifies the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-10-14 Boyi Liu , Jiayang Li , Zhuoran Yang , Hoi-To Wai , Mingyi Hong , Yu Marco Nie , Zhaoran Wang

Strategic learning studies how decision rules interact with agents who may strategically change their inputs/features to achieve better outcomes. In standard settings, models assume that the decision-maker's sole scope is to learn a…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Valia Efthymiou , Ekaterina Fedorova , Chara Podimata

Online bidding serves as a fundamental information system in mobile ecosystems, facilitating real-time ad allocation across billions of devices while optimizing both platform performance and user experience through data-driven decision…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-01-07 Huanyu Yan , Yu Huo , Min Lu , Weitong Ou , Xingyan Shi , Ruihe Shi , Xiaoying Tang

I study symmetric competitions in which each player chooses an arbitrary distribution over a one-dimensional performance index, subject to a convex cost. I establish existence of a symmetric equilibrium, document various properties it must…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-05-07 Mark Whitmeyer

In the mechanism design theory, a designer would like to implement a desired social choice function which specifies her favorite outcome for each possible profile of all agents' types. Traditionally, the designer may be in a dilemma in the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2019-06-04 Haoyang Wu

We consider a stochastic online problem where $n$ applicants arrive over time, one per time step. Upon arrival of each applicant their cost per time step is revealed, and we have to fix the duration of employment, starting immediately. This…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2017-05-31 Yann Disser , John Fearnley , Martin Gairing , Oliver Göbel , Max Klimm , Daniel Schmand , Alexander Skopalik , Andreas Tönnis

Incentives are key to the success of crowdsourcing which heavily depends on the level of user participation. This paper designs an incentive mechanism to motivate a heterogeneous crowd of users to actively participate in crowdsourcing…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2018-12-13 Tie Luo , Salil S. Kanhere , Sajal K. Das , Hwee-Pink Tan

Many high-stakes AI deployments proceed only if every stakeholder deems the system acceptable relative to their own minimum standard. With randomization over a finite menu of options, this becomes a feasibility question: does there exist a…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Davin Choo , Paul W. Goldberg , Nicholas Teh