Related papers: Timing Games: Probabilistic backrunning and spam
Understanding the strategic behavior of miners in a blockchain is of great importance for its proper operation. A common model for mining games considers an infinite time horizon, with players optimizing asymptotic average objectives.…
An extensive literature in economics and social science addresses contests, in which players compete to outperform each other on some measurable criterion, often referred to as a player's score, or output. Players incur costs that are an…
The most costly and annoying characteristic of the e-mail communication system is the large number of unsolicited commercial e-mails, known as spams, that are continuously received. Via the investigation of the statistical properties of the…
This paper presents a novel staking coopetition design aimed at incentivizing decentralization and continuous growth of economic security within a proof-of-stake system. Staking rewards follow a nonlinear mapping relative to stake size.…
We revisit the game in which each of several players chooses a pattern and then a coin is flipped repeatedly until one of these patterns is generated. In particular, we demonstrate how to compute the probability of any one player winning…
A Dynkin game is a zero-sum, stochastic stopping game between two players where either player can stop the game at any time for an observable payoff. Typically the payoff process of the max-player is assumed to be smaller than the payoff…
Blockchain protocols incentivize participation through monetary rewards, assuming rational actors behave honestly to maximize their gains. However, attackers may attempt to harm others even at personal cost. These denial of profit attacks…
In financial applications, latency advantages -- the ability to make decisions later than others, even without the ability to see what others have done -- can provide individual participants with an edge by allowing them to gather…
We study variants of a stochastic game inspired by backgammon where players may propose to double the stake, with the game state dictated by a one-dimensional random walk. Our variants allow for different numbers of proposals and different…
The ability of a deterministic, plastic system to learn to imitate stochastic behavior is analyzed. Two neural networks -actually, two perceptrons- are put to play a zero-sum game one against the other. The competition, by acting as a kind…
Matching platforms, from ridesharing to food delivery to competitive gaming, face a fundamental operational dilemma: match agents immediately to minimize waiting costs, or delay to exploit the efficiency gains of thicker markets. Yet…
Using methods from the statistical mechanics of disordered systems we analyze the properties of bimatrix games with random payoffs in the limit where the number of pure strategies of each player tends to infinity. We analytically calculate…
Blockchain-based cryptocurrencies secure a decentralized consensus protocol by incentives. The protocol participants, called miners, generate (mine) a series of blocks, each containing monetary transactions created by system users. As…
We study a class of two-player repeated games with incomplete information and informational externalities. In these games, two states are chosen at the outset, and players get private information on the pair, before engaging in repeated…
Probabilistic model checking for stochastic games enables formal verification of systems that comprise competing or collaborating entities operating in a stochastic environment. Despite good progress in the area, existing approaches focus…
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…
Recent work has considered natural variations of the multi-armed bandit problem, where the reward distribution of each arm is a special function of the time passed since its last pulling. In this direction, a simple (yet widely applicable)…
We provide a game-theoretic analysis of the problem of front-running attacks. We use it to distinguish attacks from legitimate competition among honest users for having their transactions included earlier in the block. We also use it to…
A $p$-beauty contest is a wide class of games of guessing the most popular strategy among other players. In particular, guessing a fraction of a mean of numbers chosen by all players is a classic behavioral experiment designed to test…
We consider concurrent games played on graphs. At every round of a game, each player simultaneously and independently selects a move; the moves jointly determine the transition to a successor state. Two basic objectives are the safety…