Related papers: Timing Games in Responsive Consensus Protocols
Blockchains offer a decentralized and secure execution environment strong enough to host cryptocurrencies, but the state-replication model makes on-chain computation expensive. To avoid heavy on-chain workloads, systems like Truebit and…
We study the strategic considerations of miners participating in the bitcoin's protocol. We formulate and study the stochastic game that underlies these strategic considerations. The miners collectively build a tree of blocks, and they are…
In game theory, mechanism design is concerned with the design of incentives so that a desired outcome of the game can be achieved. In this paper, we study the design of incentives so that a desirable equilibrium is obtained, for instance,…
Randomized experiments can be susceptible to selection bias due to potential non-compliance by the participants. While much of the existing work has studied compliance as a static behavior, we propose a game-theoretic model to study…
Sealed-bid auctions play a crucial role in blockchain ecosystems. Previous works introduced viable blockchain sealed-bid auction protocols, leveraging timed commitments for bid encryption. However, a crucial challenge remains unresolved in…
In this paper, we consider the problem of generating fair randomness in a deterministic, multi-agent context (for instance, a decentralised game built on a blockchain). The existing state-of-the-art approaches are either susceptible to…
We study fault-tolerant consensus in a variant of the synchronous message passing model, where, in each round, every node can choose to be awake or asleep. This is known as the sleeping model (Chatterjee, Gmyr, Pandurangan PODC 2020) and…
Best-response mechanisms (Nisan, Schapira, Valiant, Zohar, 2011) provide a unifying framework for studying various distributed protocols in which the participants are instructed to repeatedly best respond to each others' strategies. Two…
Despite the increasing popularity and successful examples of crowdsourcing, it is stripped of aureole when collective efforts are derailed or severely hindered by elaborate sabotage. A service exchange dilemma arises when non-cooperation…
We consider two-player games played in real time on game structures with clocks where the objectives of players are described using parity conditions. The games are \emph{concurrent} in that at each turn, both players independently propose…
Decentralization has an important geographic dimension that conventional metrics, such as stake distribution, often overlook. Validator location affects resilience to regional shocks (e.g., outages, natural disasters, or government…
Coding theory revolves around the incorporation of redundancy into transmitted symbols, computation tasks, and stored data to guard against adversarial manipulation. However, error correction in coding theory is contingent upon a strict…
In the paper, we present designs for multiple blockchain consensus primitives and a novel blockchain system, all based on the use of trusted execution environments (TEEs), such as Intel SGX-enabled CPUs. First, we show how using TEEs for…
Tolerance implies enduring trying circumstances with a fair and objective attitude. To determine whether evolutionary advantages might be stemming from diverse levels of tolerance in a population, we study a spatial public goods game, where…
To participate in the distributed consensus of permissionless blockchains, prospective nodes -- or miners -- provide proof of designated, costly resources. However, in contrast to the intended decentralization, current data on blockchain…
In this paper, we study contention resolution protocols from a game-theoretic perspective. We focus on \emph{acknowledgment-based} protocols, where a user gets feedback from the channel only when she attempts transmission. In this case she…
Modern blockchains guarantee that submitted transactions will be included eventually; a property formally known as liveness. But financial activity requires transactions to be included in a timely manner. Unfortunately, classical liveness…
Ethereum 2.0 is the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization and a widely used smart contract platform. Therefore, examining the reliability of Ethereum 2.0's incentive mechanism is crucial, particularly its effectiveness in…
This paper considers an online multi-player resource-sharing game with bandit feedback. Multiple players choose from a finite collection of resources in a time slotted system. In each time slot, each resource brings a random reward that is…
We analyze an extended model of the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma where agents decide to play based on the data from their limited memory or recommendations. The cooperators can decide whether to play with the matched opponent or not. The…