Related papers: Distribution-Free Equilibrium in Search Contests

Teams frequently compete on multiple fronts: political parties contest districts for majority control, contractors field specialized units to win procurement contracts, and squads play match by match for titles. Although the prize accrues…

In this work we present and analyze a fluid-mechanical model of competition (scavenging) amongst $N$ liquid droplets (individual competitors). The eventual outcome of this competition depends sensitively on the average resource (volume) per…

Richman games are zero-sum games, where in each turn players bid in order to determine who will play next [Lazarus et al.'99]. We extend the theory to impartial general-sum two player games called \emph{bidding games}, showing the existence…

In many first-price auctions, bidders face considerable strategic uncertainty: They cannot perfectly anticipate the other bidders' bidding behavior. We propose a model in which bidders do not know the entire distribution of opponent bids…

We study the design of optimal incentives in sequential processes. To do so, we consider a basic and fundamental model in which an agent initiates a value-creating sequential process through costly investment with random success. If…

We obtain distribution-free bounds for various fundamental quantities used in probability theory by solving optimization problems that search for extreme distributions among all distributions with the same mean and dispersion. These…

Incentives are more likely to elicit desired outcomes when they are designed based on accurate models of agents' strategic behavior. A growing literature, however, suggests that people do not quite behave like standard economic agents in a…

This paper considers a two-player game where each player chooses a resource from a finite collection of options. Each resource brings a random reward. Both players have statistical information regarding the rewards of each resource.…

We study how to incentivize agents in a target group to produce a higher output in the context of incomplete information, by means of rank-order allocation contests. We describe a symmetric Bayes--Nash equilibrium for contests that have two…

This paper studies the Best-of-K Bandit game: At each time the player chooses a subset S among all N-choose-K possible options and observes reward max(X(i) : i in S) where X is a random vector drawn from a joint distribution. The objective…

This paper considers a class of noncooperative games in which the feasible decision sets of all players are coupled together by a coupled inequality constraint. Adopting the variational inequality formulation of the game, we first introduce…

Competition for available resources is natural amongst coexisting species, and the fittest contenders dominate over the rest in evolution. The dynamics of this selection is studied using a simple linear model. It has similarities to…

We study how increasing competition, by making prizes more unequal, affects effort in contests. In a finite type-space environment, we characterize the equilibrium, analyze the effect of competition under linear costs, and identify…

We consider two-player contests with the possibility of ties and study the effect of different tie-breaking rules on effort. For ratio-form and difference-form contests that admit pure-strategy Nash equilibrium, we find that the effort of…

We study buyer-optimal procurement mechanisms when quality is contractible. When some costs are borne by every participant of a procurement auction regardless of winning, the classic analysis should be amended. We show that an optimal…

Entities in multi-agent systems may seek conflicting subobjectives, and this leads to competition between them. To address performance degradation due to competition, we consider a bi-level lottery where a social planner at the high level…

Given a skew-symmetric matrix, the corresponding two-player symmetric zero-sum game is defined as follows: one player, the row player, chooses a row and the other player, the column player, chooses a column. The payoff of the row player is…

In finite games mixed Nash equilibria always exist, but pure equilibria may fail to exist. To assess the relevance of this nonexistence, we consider games where the payoffs are drawn at random. In particular, we focus on games where a large…

We consider a symmetric two-player contest, in which the choice set of effort is constrained. We apply a fundamental property of the payoff function to show that, under standard assumptions, there exists a unique Nash equilibrium in pure…

We study a class of location games where players want to attract as many resources as possible and pay a cost when deviating from an exogenous reference location. This class of games includes political competitions between policy-interested…