Related papers: Maximizing Social Welfare with Side Payments

In strategic games such as the prisoner's dilemma, allowing players to make binding offers of utility transfers before play has been shown to alter incentives and potentially support cooperative outcomes. These preplay exchange mechanisms…

We are interested in mechanisms that maximize social welfare. In [1] this problem was studied for multi-unit auctions with unit demand bidders and for the public project problem, and in each case social welfare undominated mechanisms in the…

According to the proportional allocation mechanism from the network optimization literature, users compete for a divisible resource -- such as bandwidth -- by submitting bids. The mechanism allocates to each user a fraction of the resource…

We study incentive-compatible mechanisms that maximize the Nash Social Welfare. Since traditional incentive-compatible mechanisms cannot maximize the Nash Social Welfare even approximately, we propose changing the traditional model.…

We introduce one-way games, a framework motivated by applications in large-scale power restoration, humanitarian logistics, and integrated supply-chains. The distinguishable feature of the games is that the payoff of some player is…

This paper studies the connection between a class of mean-field games and a social welfare optimization problem. We consider a mean-field game in function spaces with a large population of agents, and each agent seeks to minimize an…

The decisions that human beings make to allocate time has significant bearing on economic output and to the sustenance of social networks. The time allocation problem motivates our formal analysis of the resource allocation game, where…

Blockchain-based smart contracts offer a new take on credible commitment, where players can commit to actions in reaction to actions of others. Such reaction-function games extend on strategic games with players choosing reaction functions…

Commitment devices are powerful tools that can influence and incentivise certain behaviours by linking them to rewards or punishments. These devices are particularly useful in decision-making, as they can steer individuals towards specific…

Commitment is a well-established mechanism for fostering cooperation in human society and multi-agent systems. However, existing research has predominantly focused on the commitment that neglects the freedom of players to abstain from an…

Games with incomplete preferences are an important model for studying rational decision-making in scenarios where players face incomplete information about their preferences and must contend with incomparable outcomes. We study the problem…

We identify a subtle security issue that impacts the design of smart contracts, because agents may themselves deploy smart contracts (side contracts). Typically, equilibria of games are analyzed in vitro, under the assumption that players…

Mean field games (MFG) and mean field control (MFC) problems have been introduced to study large populations of strategic players. They correspond respectively to non-cooperative or cooperative scenarios, where the aim is to find the Nash…

We investigate what quantum advantages can be obtained in multipartite non-cooperative games by studying how different types of quantum resources can lead to new Nash equilibria and improve social welfare -- a measure of the quality of an…

A fair gambling is hard to be made between two spatially separated parties without introducing a trusted third party. Here we propose a novel gambling protocol, which enables fair gambling between two distant parties without the help of a…

I present a dynamic, voluntary contribution mechanism, public good game and derive its potential outcomes. In each period, players endogenously determine contribution productivity by engaging in costly investment. The level of contribution…

We consider a 3-player game in the normal form, in which each player has two actions. We assume that the game is symmetric and repeated infinitely many times. At each stage players make their choices knowing only the average payoffs from…

We introduce a new measure of the discrepancy in strategic games between the social welfare in a Nash equilibrium and in a social optimum, that we call selfishness level. It is the smallest fraction of the social welfare that needs to be…

AI agents will be predictable in certain ways that traditional agents are not. Where and how can we leverage this predictability in order to improve social welfare? We study this question in a game-theoretic setting where one agent can pay…

We introduce and study incentive equilibria for multi-player meanpayoff games. Incentive equilibria generalise well-studied solution concepts such as Nash equilibria and leader equilibria (also known as Stackelberg equilibria). Recall that…