Related papers: Timing Games: Probabilistic backrunning and spam
We propose a model suggesting that honest-but-rational consensus participants may play timing games, and strategically delay their block proposal to optimize MEV capture, while still ensuring the proposal's timely inclusion in the canonical…
An unknown positive number of items arrive at independent uniformly distributed times in the interval [0,1] to a selector, whose task is to pick online the last one. We show that under the assumption of an adversary determining the number…
High-frequency trading, in both traditional and decentralized markets, induces latency races and redundant order flow as traders spend resources to win time-sensitive opportunities. We show that auctioning artificial time priority can…
When opposing parties compete for a prize, the sunk effort players exert during the conflict can affect the value of the winner's reward. These spillovers can have substantial influence on the equilibrium behavior of participants in…
We study two-player security games which can be viewed as sequences of nonzero-sum matrix games played by an Attacker and a Defender. The evolution of the game is based on a stochastic fictitious play process. Players do not have access to…
We study game-theoretic models for capturing participation in blockchain systems. Permissionless blockchains can be naturally viewed as games, where a set of potentially interested users is faced with the dilemma of whether to engage with…
The timing of strategic exit is one of the most important but difficult business decisions, especially under competition and uncertainty. Motivated by this problem, we examine a stochastic game of exit in which players are uncertain about…
Probabilistic timed automata are a suitable formalism to model systems with real-time, nondeterministic and probabilistic behaviour. We study two-player zero-sum games on such automata where the objective of the game is specified as the…
We construct subgame-perfect equilibria with mixed strategies for symmetric stochastic timing games with arbitrary strategic incentives. The strategies are qualitatively different for local first- or second-mover advantages, which we…
We analyze bribing attacks in Proof-of-Stake distributed ledgers from a game theoretic perspective. In bribing attacks, an adversary offers participants a reward in exchange for instructing them how to behave, with the goal of attacking the…
Optimistic responsiveness -- the ability of a consensus protocol to operate at the speed of the network -- is widely used in consensus protocol design to optimize latency and throughput. However, blockchain applications incentivize…
Infinitely repeated games can support cooperative outcomes that are not equilibria in the one-shot game. The idea is to make sure that any gains from deviating will be offset by retaliation in future rounds. However, this model of…
We study the role of costly information in non-cooperative two-player games when an extrinsic third party information broker is introduced asymmetrically, allowing one player to obtain information about the other player's action. This…
We introduce a new non-zero-sum game of optimal stopping with asymmetric exercise opportunities. Given a stochastic process modelling the value of an asset, one player observes and can act on the process continuously, while the other player…
We consider a game in which players are the vertices of a directed graph. Initially, Nature chooses one player according to some fixed distribution and gives her a buck, which represents the request to perform a chore. After completing the…
In spam and malware detection, attackers exploit randomization to obfuscate malicious data and increase their chances of evading detection at test time; e.g., malware code is typically obfuscated using random strings or byte sequences to…
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…
Propagation latency is inherent to any distributed network, including blockchains. Typically, blockchain protocols provide a timing buffer for block propagation across the network. In leader-based blockchains, the leader -- block proposer…
Game-theoretical approach to the analysis of parallel algorithms is proposed. The approach is based on presentation of the parallel computing as a congestion game. In the game processes compete for resources such as core of a central…
It is known that a player in a noncooperative game can benefit by publicly restricting his possible moves before play begins. We show that, more generally, a player may benefit by publicly committing to pay an external party an amount that…