Related papers: Tournaments with a Standard
We investigate approximately optimal mechanisms in settings where bidders' utility functions are non-linear; specifically, convex, with respect to payments (such settings arise, for instance, in procurement auctions for energy). We provide…
Winners-take-all situations introduce an incentive for agents to diversify their behavior, since doing so will result in splitting an eventual price with fewer people. At the same time, when the payoff of a process depends on a parameter…
We consider two-player normal form games where each player has the same finite strategy set. The payoffs of each player are assumed to be i.i.d. random variables with a continuous distribution. We show that, with high probability, the…
This paper characterizes optimal classification when individuals adjust their behavior in response to the classification rule. We model the interaction between a designer and a population as a Stackelberg game: the designer selects a…
In a zero-sum stochastic game, at each stage, two adversary players take decisions and receive a stage payoff determined by them and by a controlled random variable representing the state of nature. The total payoff is the normalized…
Tournament solutions are frequently used to select winners from a set of alternatives based on pairwise comparisons between alternatives. Prior work has shown that several common tournament solutions tend to select large winner sets and…
Competitions are widely used to identify top performers in judgmental forecasting and machine learning, and the standard competition design ranks competitors based on their cumulative scores against a set of realized outcomes or held-out…
Balanced knockout tournaments are ubiquitous in sports competitions and are also used in decision-making and elections. The traditional computational question, that asks to compute a draw (optimal draw) that maximizes the winning…
We study competition among contests in a general model that allows for an arbitrary and heterogeneous space of contest design, where the goal of the contest designers is to maximize the contestants' sum of efforts. Our main result shows…
Entities in multi-agent systems may seek conflicting subobjectives, and this leads to competition between them. To address performance degradation due to competition, we consider a bi-level lottery where a social planner at the high level…
Multi-round competitions often double or triple the points awarded in the final round, calling it a bonus, to maximize spectators' excitement. In a two-player competition with $n$ rounds, we aim to derive the optimal bonus size to maximize…
We study bandit best-arm identification with arbitrary and potentially adversarial rewards. A simple random uniform learner obtains the optimal rate of error in the adversarial scenario. However, this type of strategy is suboptimal when the…
Tournaments are a widely used mechanism to rank alternatives in a noisy environment. This paper investigates a fundamental issue of economics in tournament design: what is the best usage of limited resources, that is, how should the…
We study a fundamental problem in optimization under uncertainty. There are $n$ boxes; each box $i$ contains a hidden reward $x_i$. Rewards are drawn i.i.d. from an unknown distribution $\mathcal{D}$. For each box $i$, we see $y_i$, an…
We consider a team game reward, and we derive a stochastic Pontryagin's maximum principle for distributed stochastic differential systems with decentralized noisy information structures. Our methodology utilizes the semi martingale…
In this paper, we consider the problem of a Principal aiming at designing a reward function for a population of heterogeneous agents. We construct an incentive based on the ranking of the agents, so that a competition among the latter is…
This paper investigates stochastic continuous time contests with a twist: the designer requires that contest participants incur some cost to submit their entries. When the designer wishes to maximize the (expected) performance of the top…
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…
This paper studies a type of rank-based mean field game in which competing agents strategically switch among multiple effort regimes. We propose an entropy regularized auxiliary problem where the switching decisions are randomized to the…
In a generalized tournament, players may have an arbitrary number of matches against each other and the outcome of the games is measured on a cardinal scale with a lower and upper bound. An axiomatic approach is applied to the problem of…