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We study a class of games in which a finite number of agents each controls a quantity of flow to be routed through a network, and are able to split their own flow between multiple paths through the network. Recent work on this model has…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2007-11-09 P. W. Goldberg , P. Polpinit

A player's payoff is modeled as consisting of two parts: a rational-value part and a distortion-value part. It is argued that the (total) payoff function should be used to explain and predict the behaviors of the players, while the rational…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-06-23 Fang-Fang Tang , Yongsheng Xu

We study a problem of trust in a distributed system in which a common resource is shared by multiple parties. In such naturally information-limited settings, parties abide by a behavioral protocol that leads to fair sharing of the resource.…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2013-07-08 Christopher Griffin , George Kesidis

In game theory, the concept of Nash equilibrium reflects the collective stability of some individual strategies chosen by selfish agents. The concept pertains to different classes of games, e.g. the sequential games, where the agents play…

Logic · Mathematics 2015-07-01 Stephane Le Roux

Coordinating the behaviour of self-interested agents in the presence of multiple Nash equilibria is a major research challenge for multi-agent systems. Pre-game communication between all the players can aid coordination in cases where the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-02-18 Wei-Chen Lee , Alessandro Abate , Michael Wooldridge

Commitments play a crucial role in game theory, shaping strategic interactions by either altering a player's own payoffs or influencing the incentives of others through outcome-contingent payments. While most research has focused on using…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-07-30 Maria Alejandra Ramirez , Rosemarie Nagel , David Wolpert , Jürgen Jost

Nash equilibrium serves as a fundamental mathematical tool in economics and game theory. However, it classically assumes knowledge of player utilities, whereas economics generally regards preferences as more fundamental. To leverage…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Ian Gemp , Crystal Qian , Marc Lanctot , Kate Larson

Strategic interactions often take place in an environment rife with uncertainty. As a result, the equilibrium of a game is intimately related to the information available to its players. The \emph{signaling problem} abstracts the task faced…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2014-10-14 Yu Cheng , Ho Yee Cheung , Shaddin Dughmi , Shanghua Teng

We introduce a novel class of Nash equilibrium seeking dynamics for non-cooperative games with a finite number of players, where the convergence to the Nash equilibrium is bounded by a KL function with a settling time that can be upper…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-12-25 Jorge I. Poveda , Miroslav Krstic , Tamer Basar

We consider a dynamical approach to sequential games. By restricting the convertibility relation over strategy profiles, we obtain a semi-potential (in the sense of Kukushkin), and we show that in finite games the corresponding restriction…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2016-09-15 Stéphane Le Roux , Arno Pauly

We study a multi-agent contracting problem where agents exert costly effort to achieve individually observable binary outcomes. While the principal can theoretically extract the full social welfare using a discriminatory contract that…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Johannes Brustle , Paul Duetting , Stefano Leonardi , Tomasz Ponitka , Matteo Russo

Classical game theory is a powerful framework to analyze the strategic interactions among rational players. However, in many real-life scenarios, players choose actions based on their inherent natural tendencies rather than deliberate…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-02-03 Raghupati Vyas , Khushboo Agarwal , Konstantin Avrachenkov , Veeraruna Kavitha

A recently introduced concept of "cooperative equilibrium", based on the assumption that players have a natural attitude to cooperation, has been proven a powerful tool in predicting human behaviour in social dilemmas. In this paper, we…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2015-09-28 Valerio Capraro , Maria Polukarov , Matteo Venanzi , Nicholas R. Jennings

We initiate the study of transaction fee mechanism design for blockchain protocols in which multiple block producers contribute to the production of each block. Our contributions include: - We propose an extensive-form (multi-stage) game…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Pranav Garimidi , Lioba Heimbach , Tim Roughgarden

We revisit a classic coordination problem from the perspective of mechanism design: how can we coordinate a social welfare maximizing flow in a network congestion game with selfish players? The classical approach, which computes tolls as a…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2015-05-11 Ryan Rogers , Aaron Roth , Jonathan Ullman , Zhiwei Steven Wu

Game-theoretic techniques and equilibria analysis facilitate the design and verification of competitive systems. While algorithmic complexity of equilibria computation has been extensively studied, practical implementation and application…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-02-02 Marta Kwiatkowska , Gethin Norman , David Parker , Gabriel Santos

A strategy profile in a multi-player game is a Nash equilibrium if no player can unilaterally deviate to achieve a strictly better payoff. A profile is an $\epsilon$-Nash equilibrium if no player can gain more than $\epsilon$ by…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Ali Asadi , Léonard Brice , Krishnendu Chatterjee , K. S. Thejaswini

A growing line of work reframes preference-based fine-tuning of large language models game-theoretically: Nash Learning from Human Feedback (NLHF) recasts the problem as a zero-sum game over policies. However, optimization is over expected…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Max Horwitz , Jake Gonzales , Eric Mazumdar , Lillian J. Ratliff

It is well known that a non-cooperative game may have multiple equilibria. In this paper we consider the efficiency of games, measured by the ratio between the aggregate payoff over all Nash equilibria and that over all admissible controls.…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-08-20 Jianfeng Zhang

In a network game, players interact over a network and the utility of each player depends on his own action and on an aggregate of his neighbours' actions. Many real world networks of interest are asymmetric and involve a large number of…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Kiran Rokade , Adit Jain , Francesca Parise , Vikram Krishnamurthy , Eva Tardos