Related papers: Reducing the Incentive to Tank: The Ex Post Gold P…
The NBA draft can incentivize teams to deliberately lose. We propose a draft mechanism that is practical, incentive-compatible, and favors weaker teams. The Carry-Over Lottery Allocation (COLA) framework represents a paradigm shift in…
Multi-stage tournaments consisting of a round-robin group stage followed by a knockout phase are ubiquitous in sports. However, this format is incentive incompatible if at least two teams from a group advance to the knockout stage where the…
Tanking, the act of deliberately dropping points or losing a game in order to gain some other advantage, is usually seen as being against the spirit of sports. It can be even more serious if playing a draw is a (weakly) dominant strategy…
For every sports tournament, it is an important requirement to provide contestants with the appropriate incentives to perform. However, incentive compatibility is usually considered an all or nothing (binary) concept in the academic…
Individuals are often faced with temptations that can lead them astray from long-term goals. We're interested in developing interventions that steer individuals toward making good initial decisions and then maintaining those decisions over…
We study how a platform should design early exposure and rewards when creators strategically choose quality before release. A short testing window with a pass/fail bar induces a pass probability, the slope of which is the key sufficient…
Influential benchmarks incentivize competing model developers to strategically allocate post-training resources toward improvements on the leaderboard, a phenomenon dubbed benchmaxxing or training on the test task. In this work, we initiate…
This paper aims to explore the impact of tournament design on the incentives of the contestants. We develop a simulation framework to quantify the potential gain and loss from attacking based on changes in the probability of reaching the…
Psychological research shows that enjoyment of many goods is subject to satiation, with short-term satisfaction declining after repeated exposures to the same item. Nevertheless, proposed algorithms for powering recommender systems seldom…
Sampling efficiency is a key bottleneck in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards. Existing group-based policy optimization methods, such as GRPO, allocate a fixed number of rollouts for all training prompts. This uniform allocation…
This paper extends the existing drawdown modulation control policy to include a novel restart mechanism for trading. It is known that the drawdown modulation policy guarantees the maximum percentage drawdown no larger than a prespecified…
Stochastic games with discounted payoff, introduced by Shapley, model adversarial interactions in stochastic environments where two players try to optimize a discounted sum of rewards. In this model, long-term weights are geometrically…
This paper discusses the gambling contest introduced in Seel & Strack (Gambling in contests, Discussion Paper Series of SFB/TR 15 Governance and the Efficiency of Economic Systems 375, Mar 2012.) and considers the impact of adding a penalty…
In mechanism design it is typical to impose incentive compatibility and then derive an optimal mechanism subject to this constraint. By replacing the incentive compatibility requirement with the goal of minimizing expected ex post regret,…
In J. Schwenk.(2018) ['What is the Correct Way to Seed a Knockout Tournament?' Retrieved from The American Mathematical Monthly], Schwenk identified a surprising weakness in the standard method of seeding a single elimination (or knockout)…
In reinforcement learning, the discount factor $\gamma$ controls the agent's effective planning horizon. Traditionally, this parameter was considered part of the MDP; however, as deep reinforcement learning algorithms tend to become…
Scouting is a major part of talent acquisition for any professional sports team. In the National Hockey League (NHL), the market for scouting is set by the NHLs Central Scouting Service which develops a ranking of draft eligible players. In…
Goal-conditioned policies enable decision-making models to execute diverse behaviors based on specified goals, yet their downstream performance is often highly sensitive to the choice of instructions or prompts. To bypass the limitations of…
Imitation is widely observed in populations of decision-making agents. Using our recent convergence results for asynchronous imitation dynamics on networks, we consider how such networks can be efficiently driven to a desired equilibrium…
In this work the properties of multi choice minority games are studied by means of extensive computational simulations. We have considered several ways of rewarding the strategies of the players and compared the resulting behaviours of the…