Related papers: Incentive Design in Competitive Resource Allocatio…

Within the framework of Game Theory, contests study decision-making in those situations or conflicts when rewards depend on the relative rank between contenders rather than their absolute performance. By relying on the formalism of Tullock…

We study $n$-dimensional contests between two players with heterogeneous effort costs, where each dimension (battle) is modeled as a Tullock contest. Prize-allocation rules are identity-independent, budget-balanced, and weakly increasing in…

This paper introduces a novel class of multi-stage resource allocation games that model real-world scenarios in which profitability depends on the balance between supply and demand, and where higher resource investment leads to greater…

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 investigates a two-stage game-theoretical model with multiple parallel rank-order contests. In this model, each contest designer sets up a contest and determines the prize structure within a fixed budget in the first stage.…

Incentive mechanisms for crowdsourcing have been extensively studied under the framework of all-pay auctions. Along a distinct line, this paper proposes to use Tullock contests as an alternative tool to design incentive mechanisms for…

This paper aims to design a distributed coordination algorithm for solving a multi-agent decision problem with a hierarchical structure. The primary goal is to search the Nash equilibrium of a noncooperative game such that each player has…

This paper focuses on the coordination of a large population of dynamic agents with private information over multiple periods. Each agent maximizes the individual utility, while the coordinator determines the market rule to achieve group…

This paper explores the design of contests involving $n$ contestants, focusing on how the designer decides on the number of contestants allowed and the prize structure with a fixed budget. We characterize the unique symmetric Bayesian Nash…

Tullock contests model real-life scenarios that range from competition among proof-of-work blockchain miners to rent-seeking and lobbying activities. We show that continuous-time best-response dynamics in Tullock contests with convex costs…

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…

We study techniques to incentivize self-interested agents to form socially desirable solutions in scenarios where they benefit from mutual coordination. Towards this end, we consider coordination games where agents have different intrinsic…

We apply control theoretic and optimization techniques to adaptively design incentives. In particular, we consider the problem of a planner with an objective that depends on data from strategic decision makers. The planner does not know the…

In this paper we consider a distributed coordination game played by a large number of agents with finite information sets, which characterizes emergence of a single dominant attribute out of a large number of competitors. Formally, $N$…

This paper examines the optimal organizational rules that govern the process of dividing a fixed surplus. The process is modeled as a sequential multilateral bargaining game with costly recognition. The designer sets the voting rule --…

In game theory, mechanism design is concerned with the design of incentives so that a desired outcome of the game can be achieved. In this paper, we explore the concept of equilibrium design, where incentives are designed to obtain a…

A principal uses payments conditioned on stochastic outcomes of a team project to elicit costly effort from the team members. We develop a multi-agent generalization of a classic first-order approach to contract optimization by leveraging…

To achieve an optimal outcome in many situations, agents need to choose distinct actions from one another. This is the case notably in many resource allocation problems, where a single resource can only be used by one agent at a time. How…

In game theory, mechanism design is concerned with the design of incentives so that a desired outcome of the game can be achieved. In this paper, we study the design of incentives so that a desirable equilibrium is obtained, for instance,…

Coordinating the behaviour of self-interested agents in the presence of multiple Nash equilibria is a major research challenge for multi-agent systems. Pre-game communication between all the players can aid coordination in cases where the…