English
Related papers

Related papers: Suppression and Empowerment in Contests

200 papers

We obtain partial identification of direct and spillover effects in settings with strategic interaction and discrete treatments, outcome and independent instruments. We consider a framework with two decision-makers who play pure-strategy…

Algorithms increasingly automate bidding in online auctions, raising concerns about tacit bid suppression and revenue shortfalls. Prior work identifies individual mechanisms behind algorithmic bid suppression, but it remains unclear which…

General Economics · Economics 2026-03-24 Pranjal Rawat

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…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-02-14 Hanbing Liu , Ningyuan Li , Weian Li , Qi Qi , Changyuan Yu

When users lack specific knowledge of various system parameters, their uncertainty may lead them to make undesirable deviations in their decision making. To alleviate this, an informed system operator may elect to signal information to…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-03-31 Bryce L. Ferguson , Philip N. Brown , Jason R. Marden

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…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-03-30 Teresa Esteban-Casanelles , Duarte Gonçalves

We study the effect of interim feedback policies in a dynamic all-pay auction where two players bid over two stages to win a common-value prize. We show that sequential equilibrium outcomes are characterized by Cheapest Signal Equilibria,…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-10-28 Sumit Goel , Yiqing Yan , Jeffrey Zeidel

In competitive games with private objectives, actions can reveal information about hidden parameters. Quantifying such information revelation, however, is substantially more challenging, since it depends not only on the opponent's hidden…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-03-19 Daniel Ralston , Xu Yang , Ruimeng Hu

This paper investigates the efficiency loss in social cost caused by strategic bidding behavior of individual participants in a supply-demand balancing market, and proposes a mechanism to fully recover equilibrium social optimum via…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-06-22 Kaiying Lin , Beibei Wang , Pengcheng You

We study misspecified Bayesian learning in principal-agent relationships, where an agent is assessed by an evaluator and rewarded by the market. The agent's outcome depends on their innate ability, costly effort -- whose effectiveness is…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-12-02 Federico Echenique , Anqi Li

Finite-player dynamic games with dispersed private information are difficult because actions both move payoffs and reshape what opponents learn, generating hierarchies of beliefs about beliefs. This paper provides a recursive representation…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-05-21 Sam Babichenko

Many communication, sensor network, and networked control problems involve agents (decision makers) which have either misaligned objective functions or subjective probabilistic models. In the context of such setups, we consider binary…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-09-09 Serkan Sarıtaş , Sinan Gezici , Serdar Yüksel

Many decentralized and networked control problems involve decision makers which have either misaligned criteria or subjective priors. In the context of such a setup, in this paper we consider binary signaling problems in which the decision…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-09-06 Serkan Sarıtaş , Sinan Gezici , Serdar Yüksel

This paper studies a communication game between an uninformed decision maker and two perfectly informed senders with conflicting interests. Senders can misreport information at a cost that increases with the size of the misrepresentation.…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2023-04-17 Federico Vaccari

We consider a team-production environment where all participants are motivated by career concerns, and where a team's joint productive outcome may have different reputational implications for different team members. In this context, we…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2023-05-08 Paula Onuchic , João Ramos

Reinforcement learning agents learn from rewards, but humans can uniquely assign value to novel, abstract outcomes in a goal-dependent manner. However, this flexibility is cognitively costly, making learning less efficient. Here, we propose…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2025-09-11 Gaia Molinaro , Anne G. E. Collins

An important -- but very demanding -- property in collective decision-making is strategyproofness, which requires that voters cannot benefit from submitting insincere preferences. Gibbard (1977) has shown that only rather unattractive rules…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-12-17 Felix Brandt , Patrick Lederer

The all-pay auction, a classic competitive model, is widely applied in scenarios such as political elections, sports competitions, and research and development, where all participants pay their bids regardless of winning or losing. However,…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-07-24 Yan Liu , Ying Qin , Zihe Wang

We investigate a privacy-signaling game problem in which a sender with privacy concerns observes a pair of correlated random vectors which are modeled as jointly Gaussian. The sender aims to hide one of these random vectors and convey the…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2022-03-08 Ertan Kazıklı , Sinan Gezici , Serdar Yüksel

A designer relies on an experimenter to provide information to a decision maker, but the experimenter has incentives to persuade rather than merely transmit information. Anticipating this motive, the designer can restrict the set of…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-05-05 Francesco Bilotta , Christoph Carnehl , Justus Preusser

We consider a two-player dynamic information design problem between a principal and a receiver -- a game is played between the two agents on top of a Markovian system controlled by the receiver's actions, where the principal obtains and…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-03-20 Dengwang Tang , Vijay G. Subramanian