Related papers: Sharing the proceeds from a hierarchical venture w…
In barter exchanges agents enter seeking to swap their items for other items on their wishlist. We consider a centralized barter exchange with a set of agents and items where each item has a positive value. The goal is to compute a…
In human societies, people's willingness to compete and strive for better social status as well as being envious of those perceived in some way superior lead to social structures that are intrinsically hierarchical. Here we propose an…
Public Goods Games represent one of the most useful tools to study group interactions between individuals. However, even if they could provide an explanation for the emergence and stability of cooperation in modern societies, they are not…
We consider distributed networks, such as peer-to-peer networks, whose structure can be manipulated by adjusting the rules by which vertices enter and leave the network. We focus in particular on degree distributions and show that, with…
In a setting where heterogeneous agents interact to accomplish a given set of goals, cooperation is of utmost importance, especially when agents cannot achieve their individual goals by exclusive use of their own efforts. Even when we…
Hierarchy is one of the most conspicuous features of numerous natural, technological and social systems. The underlying structures are typically complex and their most relevant organizational principle is the ordering of the ties among the…
Agents may form coalitions. Each coalition shares its endowment among its agents by applying a sharing rule. The sharing rule induces a coalition formation problem by assuming that agents rank coalitions according to the allocation they…
We study an economic model where agents trade a variety of products by using one of three competing rules: "need", "greed" and "noise". We find that the optimal strategy for any agent depends on both product composition in the overall…
We take an axiomatic approach to study redistribution problems when agents report income and needs. We formalize axioms reflecting ethical and operational principles such as additivity, impartiality and individual rationality. Different…
In a combinatorial exchange setting, players place sell (resp. buy) bids on combinations of traded goods. Besides the question of finding an optimal selection of winning bids, the question of how to share the obtained profit is of high…
Decision making can be difficult when there are many actors (or agents) who may be coordinating or competing to achieve their various ideas of the optimum outcome. Here I present a simple decision making model with an explicitly…
Redistribution mechanisms have been proposed for more efficient resource allocation but not for profit. We consider redistribution mechanism design in a setting where participants are connected and the resource owner is only connected to…
It is well understood that the structure of a social network is critical to whether or not agents can aggregate information correctly. In this paper, we study social networks that support information aggregation when rational agents act…
We consider a scenario in which leaders are required to recruit teams of followers. Each leader cannot recruit all followers, but interaction is constrained according to a bipartite network. The objective for each leader is to reach a state…
By the distributed averaging problem is meant the problem of computing the average value of a set of numbers possessed by the agents in a distributed network using only communication between neighboring agents. Gossiping is a well-known…
We study a setting in which a principal selects an agent to execute a collection of tasks according to a specified priority sequence. Agents, however, have their own individual priority sequences according to which they wish to execute the…
We present new conditions to obtain synchronization and consensus patterns in complex network systems. The key idea is to exploit symmetries of the nodes' vector fields to induce a desired synchronization/consensus pattern, where nodes are…
Consider a matching problem on a graph where disjoint sets of vertices are privately owned by self-interested agents. An edge between a pair of vertices indicates compatibility and allows the vertices to match. We seek a mechanism to…
We study a problem where a group of agents has to decide how a joint reward should be shared among them. We focus on settings where the share that each agent receives depends on the subjective opinions of its peers concerning that agent's…
What is a useful skill hierarchy for an autonomous agent? We propose an answer based on a graphical representation of how the interaction between an agent and its environment may unfold. Our approach uses modularity maximisation as a…