Related papers: Dividing the Spoils in Team Contests
A dynamical model for the distribution of resources between competing agents is studied. While global competition leads to the accumulation of all the resources by a single agent, local competition allows for a wider resource distribution.…
Political polarization can be beneficial to competing political parties. I study how electoral competition itself generates incentives to polarize voters, even when parties are ex ante identical and motivated purely by political power,…
Strategic decision-making in uncertain and adversarial environments is crucial for the security of modern systems and infrastructures. A salient feature of many optimal decision-making policies is a level of unpredictability, or randomness,…
How do incentive levels affect strategic behaviour? We address this with an experiment that separately identifies own- and opponent-incentive effects in two dominance-solvable games that differ in strategic complexity. Higher own incentives…
This paper investigates the potential benefits of cooperation in scenarios where finitely many agents compete for shared resources, leading to congestion and thereby reduced rewards. By appropriate coordination the members of 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…
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…
Strategic uncertainty complicates policy design in coordination games. To rein in strategic uncertainty, the Planner in this paper connects the problem of policy design to that of equilibrium selection. We characterize the subsidy scheme…
Strategic classification studies the design of a classifier robust to the manipulation of input by strategic individuals. However, the existing literature does not consider the effect of competition among individuals as induced by the…
High performance machine learning models have become highly dependent on the availability of large quantity and quality of training data. To achieve this, various central agencies such as the government have suggested for different data…
Fairness is desirable yet challenging to achieve within multi-agent systems, especially when agents differ in latent traits that affect their abilities. This hidden heterogeneity often leads to unequal distributions of wealth, even when…
To successfully complete a complex project, be it a construction of an airport or of a backbone IT system, agents (companies or individuals) must form a team having required competences and resources. A team can be formed either by the…
I study how organizations assign tasks to identify the best candidate to promote among a pool of workers. Task allocation and workers' motivation interact through the organization's promotion decisions. The organization designs the workers'…
We study a two-player model of conflict with multiple battlefields -- the novel element is that each of the players has their own network of spillovers so that resources allocated to one battle can be utilized in winning neighboring…
Drafts are sequential round-robin allocation procedures for distributing heterogeneous and indivisible objects among agents subject to some priority order (e.g., allocating players' contract rights to teams in professional sports leagues).…
In competitive resource allocation environments, agents often choose to form alliances; however, for some agents, doing so may not always be beneficial. Is there a method of forming alliances that always reward each of their members? We…
We study competition among contests in a general model that allows for an arbitrary and heterogeneous space of contest design, where the goal of the contest designers is to maximize the contestants' sum of efforts. Our main result shows…
A variety of social, economic, and political interactions have long been modelled after Blotto games. In this paper, we introduce a general model of dynamic $n$-player Blotto contests. The players have asymmetric resources, and the…
We study contests in which two groups compete to win (or not to win) a group-specific public-good/bad prize. Each player in the groups can exert two types of effort: one to help her own group win the prize, and one to sabotage her own…
Multi-agent systems are designed to concurrently accomplish a diverse set of tasks at unprecedented scale. Here, the central problems faced by a system operator are to decide (i) how to divide available resources amongst the agents assigned…