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In this paper, we study the allocation of indivisible chores and consider the problem of finding a fair allocation that is approximately efficient. We shift our attention from the multiplicative approximation to the additive one.
We investigate infinite games on finite graphs where the information flow is perturbed by nondeterministic signalling delays. It is known that such perturbations make synthesis problems virtually unsolvable, in the general case.
We consider a task of scheduling with a common deadline on a single machine. Every player reports to a scheduler the length of his job and the scheduler needs to finish as many jobs as possible by the deadline.
We consider incentive compatible mechanisms for a domain that is very close to the domain of scheduling $n$ unrelated machines: the single exception is that the valuation of just one machine is submodular. For the scheduling problem with such cost functions, we give a lower bound of $\Omega(\sqrt{n})$ on the approxima...
In this paper, we analyze the misère versions of two impartial combinatorial games: k-Bounded Greedy Nim and Greedy Nim. We present a complete solution to both games by showing necessary and sufficient conditions for a position to be P-positions.
Coordinate descent methods are popular in machine learning and optimization for their simple sparse updates and excellent practical performance. In the context of large-scale sequential game solving, these same properties would be attractive, but until now no such methods were known, because the strategy spaces do not...
We study the fair division of items to agents supposing that agents can form groups. We thus give natural generalizations of popular concepts such as envy-freeness and Pareto efficiency to groups of fixed sizes.
Entanglement is a complexity measure of digraphs that origins in fixed-point logics. Its combinatorial purpose is to measure the nested depth of cycles in digraphs.
In congested urban areas, it remains a pressing challenge to reduce unnecessary vehicle circling for parking while at the same time maximize parking space utilization. In observance of new information technologies that have become readily accessible to drivers and parking agencies, we develop a dynamic non-cooperative...
We consider an attacker-operator game for monitoring a large-scale network that is comprised on components that differ in their criticality levels. In this zero-sum game, the operator seeks to position a limited number of sensors to monitor the network against an attacker who strategically targets a network component....
We study the optimal mechanism design problem faced by a market intermediary who makes revenue by connecting buyers and sellers. We first show that the optimal intermediation protocol has substantial structure: it is the solution to an algorithmic pricing problem in which seller's costs are replaced with virtual c...
Existing solvers for imperfect-information extensive-form games (IIEFGs) often struggle with scalability in terms of action and state space sizes and the number of time steps. However, many real-world games involve continuous action and state spaces and occur in continuous time, making them differential in nature.
The broad objective of this paper is to propose a mathematical model for the study of causes of wage inequality and relate it to choices of consumption, the technologies of production, and the composition of labor in an economy. The paper constructs a Simple Closed Model, or an SCM, for short, for closed economies, in...
Following the publication of Bitcoin's arguably most famous attack, selfish mining, various works have introduced mechanisms to enhance blockchain systems' game theoretic resilience. Some reward mechanisms, like FruitChains, have been shown to be equilibria in theory.
Given a batch of human computation tasks, a commonly ignored aspect is how the price (i.e., the reward paid to human workers) of these tasks must be set or varied in order to meet latency or cost constraints. Often, the price is set up-front and not modified, leading to either a much higher monetary cost than needed (...
Fictitious play is a popular learning algorithm in which players that utilize the history of actions played by the players and the knowledge of their own payoff matrix can converge to the Nash equilibrium under certain conditions on the game. We consider the presence of an intelligent player that has access to the ent...
Human-annotated data plays a vital role in training large language models (LLMs), such as supervised fine-tuning and human preference alignment. However, it is not guaranteed that paid human annotators produce high-quality data.
Elections involving a very large voter population often lead to outcomes that surprise many. This is particularly important for the elections in which results affect the economy of a sizable population.
We propose measurement integrity, a property related to ex post reward fairness, as a novel desideratum for peer prediction mechanisms in many natural applications. Like robustness against strategic reporting, the property that has been the primary focus of the peer prediction literature, measurement integrity is an i...
We study interactions between agents in multi-agent systems, in which the agents are misinformed with regards to the game that they play, essentially having a subjective and incorrect understanding of the setting, without being aware of it. For that, we introduce a new game-theoretic concept, called misinformation gam...
We study multiplayer reachability games played on a finite directed graph equipped with target sets, one for each player. In those reachability games, it is known that there always exists a Nash equilibrium (NE) and a subgame perfect equilibrium (SPE).
Congestion games are a classical type of games studied in game theory, in which n players choose a resource, and their individual cost increases with the number of other players choosing the same resource. In network congestion games (NCGs), the resources correspond to simple paths in a graph, e.g. representing routin...
This paper considers prior-independent mechanism design, in which a single mechanism is designed to achieve approximately optimal performance on every prior distribution from a given class. Most results in this literature focus on mechanisms with truthtelling equilibria, a.k.a., truthful mechanisms.
We introduce a new paradigm for game theory -- Bayesian satisfaction. This novel approach is a synthesis of the idea of Bayesian rationality introduced by Aumann, and satisfaction games.
Throughout the past decade, there has been an extensive research on scheduling the hospital resources such as the operation theatre(s) (OTs) and the experts (such as nurses, doctors etc.) inside the hospitals. With the technological growth, mainly advancement in communication media (such as smart phones, video confere...
The generalized second price (GSP) auction has served as the core selling mechanism for sponsored search ads for over a decade. However, recent trends expanding the set of allowed ad formats---to include a variety of sizes, decorations, and other distinguishing features---have raised critical problems for GSP-based pl...
In the classical principal-agent problem, a principal must design a contract to incentivize an agent to perform an action on behalf of the principal. We study the classical principal-agent problem in a setting where the agent can be of one of several types (affecting the outcome of actions they might take).
In this paper, we show a tight approximation guarantee for budget-feasible mechanisms with an additive buyer. We propose a new simple randomized mechanism with approximation ratio of $2$, improving the previous best known result of $3$.
There are only limited classes of multi-player stochastic games in which independent learning is guaranteed to converge to a Nash equilibrium. Markov potential games are a key example of such classes.
We investigate approximately optimal mechanisms in settings where bidders' utility functions are non-linear; specifically, convex, with respect to payments (such settings arise, for instance, in procurement auctions for energy). We provide constant factor approximation guarantees for mechanisms that are independen...
We study strategic games on weighted directed graphs, where the payoff of a player is defined as the sum of the weights on the edges from players who chose the same strategy augmented by a fixed non-negative bonus for picking a given strategy. These games capture the idea of coordination in the absence of globally com...
We consider trading indivisible and easily transferable \emph{durable goods}, which are goods that an agent can receive, use, and trade again for a different good. This is often the case with books that can be read and later exchanged for unread ones.
We study the problem of fairly allocating a set of indivisible goods among agents with {\em bivalued submodular valuations} -- each good provides a marginal gain of either $a$ or $b$ ($a < b$) and goods have decreasing marginal gains. This is a natural generalization of two well-studied valuation classes -- bivalue...
We study the computational complexity of basic decision problems for one-counter simple stochastic games (OC-SSGs), under various objectives. OC-SSGs are 2-player turn-based stochastic games played on the transition graph of classic one-counter automata.
We study auction-theoretic scheduling in cellular networks using the idea of mean field equilibrium (MFE). Here, agents model their opponents through a distribution over their action spaces and play the best response.
In multi-hop secondary networks, bidding strategies for spectrum auction, route selection and relaying incentives should be jointly considered to establish multi-hop communication. In this paper, a framework for joint resource bidding and tipping is developed where users iteratively revise their strategies, which incl...
We present algorithms for implementing local spectrum redistribution in wireless networks using a mechanism design approach. For example, in single-hop request scheduling, secondary users are modeled as rational agents that have private utility when getting assigned a channel for successful transmission.
In this paper, we discuss a stochastic decision problem of optimally selecting the order in which to try $n$ opportunities that may yield an uncertain reward in the future. The motivation came out from pure curiosity, after an informal conversation about what could be the best way to date friends.
Incentive mechanisms for crowdsourcing are designed to incentivize financially self-interested workers to generate and report high-quality labels. Existing mechanisms are often developed as one-shot static solutions, assuming a certain level of knowledge about worker models (expertise levels, costs of exerting efforts...
In digital advertising, online platforms allocate ad impressions through real-time auctions, where advertisers typically rely on autobidding agents to optimize bids on their behalf. Unlike traditional auctions for physical goods, the value of an ad impression is uncertain and depends on the unknown click-through rate ...
John von Neumann studied a simplified version of poker where the "deck" consists of infinitely many cards, in fact, all real numbers between $0$ and $1$. We harness the power of computation, both numeric and symbolic, to investigate analogs with finitely many cards.
We provide a constructive proof of Border's theorem [Bor91, HR15a] and its generalization to reduced-form auctions with asymmetric bidders [Bor07, MV10, CKM13]. Given a reduced form, we identify a subset of Border constraints that are necessary and sufficient to determine its feasibility.
The celebrated Gibbard-Satterthwaite Theorem states that any surjective social choice function which is defined over the universal domain of preferences and is strategy-proof must be dictatorial. Aswal, Chatterji and Sen generalize the Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem by showing that the Gibbard-Satterthwaite theorem sti...
The Shapley-Shubik index is a specialization of the Shapley value and is widely applied to evaluate the power distribution in committees drawing binary decisions. It was generalized to decisions with more than two levels of approval both in the input and the output.
In the secretary problem we are faced with an online sequence of elements with values. Upon seeing an element we have to make an irrevocable take-it-or-leave-it decision.
We propose a new hierarchical approach to understand the complexity of the open problem of computing a Nash equilibrium in a bimatrix game. Specifically, we investigate a hierarchy of bimatrix games $(A,B)$ which results from restricting the rank of the matrix $A+B$ to be of fixed rank at most $k$.
We initiate the study of the capacity constrained facility location problem from a mechanism design perspective. The capacity constrained setting leads to a new strategic environment where a facility serves a subset of the population, which is endogenously determined by the ex-post Nash equilibrium of an induced subga...
The emerging edge computing paradigm promises to deliver superior user experience and enable a wide range of Internet of Things (IoT) applications. In this work, we propose a new market-based framework for efficiently allocating resources of heterogeneous capacity-limited edge nodes (EN) to multiple competing services...
We consider a multi-stage facility reallocation problems on the real line, where a facility is being moved between time stages based on the locations reported by $n$ agents. The aim of the reallocation algorithm is to minimise the social cost, i.e., the sum over the total distance between the facility and all agents a...
The prophet inequality is one of the cornerstone problems in optimal stopping theory and has become a crucial tool for designing sequential algorithms in Bayesian settings. In the i.i.d. $k$-selection prophet inequality problem, we sequentially observe $n$ non-negative random values sampled from a known distribution.
It is widely believed that computing payments needed to induce truthful bidding is somehow harder than simply computing the allocation. We show that the opposite is true: creating a randomized truthful mechanism is essentially as easy as a single call to a monotone allocation rule.
This paper presents a new partial two-player game, called the \emph{cannibal animal game}, which is a variant of Tic-Tac-Toe. The game is played on the infinite grid, where in each round a player chooses and occupies free cells.
We consider two-player games over graphs and give tight bounds on the memory size of strategies ensuring safety objectives. More specifically, we show that the minimal number of memory states of a strategy ensuring a safety objective is given by the size of the maximal antichain of left quotients with respect to langu...
In many smart infrastructure applications flexibility in achieving sustainability goals can be gained by engaging end-users. However, these users often have heterogeneous preferences that are unknown to the decision-maker tasked with improving operational efficiency.
In an economic market, sellers, infomediaries and customers constitute an economic network. Each seller has her own customer group and the seller's private customers are unobservable to other sellers.
The problem of lifting a preference order on a set of objects to a preference order on a family of subsets of this set is a fundamental problem with a wide variety of applications in AI. The process is often guided by axioms postulating properties the lifted order should have.
In this note, we revisit the \emph{relaxation and rounding} technique employed several times in algorithmic mechanism design. We try to introduce a general framework which covers the most significant algorithms in mechanism design that use the relaxation and rounding technique.
We consider the problem of fairly allocating indivisible goods, among agents, under cardinality constraints and additive valuations. In this setting, we are given a partition of the entire set of goods---i.e., the goods are categorized---and a limit is specified on the number of goods that can be allocated from each c...
Usually, to apply game-theoretic methods, we must specify utilities precisely, and we run the risk that the solutions we compute are not robust to errors in this specification. Ordinal games provide an attractive alternative: they require specifying only which outcomes are preferred to which other ones.
As an effective method to protect the daily access to sensitive data against malicious attacks, the audit mechanism has been widely deployed in various practical fields. In order to examine security vulnerabilities and prevent the leakage of sensitive data in a timely manner, the database logging system usually employ...
We study a class of procurement auctions with a budget constraint, where an auctioneer is interested in buying resources or services from a set of agents. Ideally, the auctioneer would like to select a subset of the resources so as to maximize his valuation function, without exceeding a given budget.
Paper develops axiomatic characterization of the family of majority vote rules in the way alternative to characterization of the majority vote given in paper of Kenneth O. May in the 1952. This, similar but different, axiomatics focuses on the consistency of the voting procedure.
This paper presents an exact penalization theory of the generalized Nash equilibrium problem (GNEP) that has its origin from the renowned Arrow-Debreu general economic equilibrium model. While the latter model is the foundation of much of mathematical economics, the GNEP provides a mathematical model of multi-agent no...
Stochastic multiplayer games (SMGs) have gained attention in the field of strategy synthesis for multi-agent reactive systems. However, standard SMGs are limited to modeling systems where all agents have full knowledge of the state of the game.
Information asymmetry in games enables players with the information advantage to manipulate others' beliefs by strategically revealing information to other players. This work considers a double-sided information asymmetry in a Bayesian Stackelberg game, where the leader's realized action, sampled from the mixe...
We consider the problem of allocating multiple indivisible items to a set of networked agents to maximize the social welfare subject to network externalities. Here, the social welfare is given by the sum of agents' utilities and externalities capture the effect that one user of an item has on the item's value ...
We introduce locality: a new property of multi-bidder auctions that formally separates the simplicity of optimal single-dimensional multi-bidder auctions from the complexity of optimal multi-dimensional multi-bidder auctions. Specifically, consider the revenue-optimal, Bayesian Incentive Compatible auction for buyers ...
We investigate weighted settings of popular matching problems with matroid constraints. The concept of popularity was originally defined for matchings in bipartite graphs, where vertices have preferences over the incident edges.
Harry hides on an edge of a graph and does not move from there. Sally, starting from a known origin, tries to find him as soon as she can.
Bargaining networks model the behavior of a set of players that need to reach pairwise agreements for making profits. Nash bargaining solutions are special outcomes of such games that are both stable and balanced.
Berge equilibrium in the sense of Zhukovskii (Berge-Zhukovskii) is an alternate solution concept in non-cooperative game theory that formalizes cooperation in a noncooperative setting. In this paper the epsilon-Berge-Zhukovskii equilibrium is introduced and characterized by using a generative relation.
Recently, Dallal, Neider, and Tabuada studied a generalization of the classical game-theoretic model used in program synthesis, which additionally accounts for unmodeled intermittent disturbances. In this extended framework, one is interested in computing optimally resilient strategies, i.e., strategies that are resil...
Throttling is a popular method of budget management for online ad auctions in which the platform modulates the participation probability of an advertiser in order to smoothly spend her budget across many auctions. In this work, we investigate the setting in which all of the advertisers simultaneously employ throttling...
Social dilemmas are situations in which collective welfare is at odds with individual gain. One widely studied example, due to the conflict it poses between human behaviour and game theoretic reasoning, is the Traveler's Dilemma.
We study fair allocation of indivisible items, where the items are furnished with a set of conflicts, and agents are not permitted to receive conflicting items. This kind of constraint captures, for example, participating in events that overlap in time, or taking on roles in the presence of conflicting interests.
Congestion games are attractive because they can model many concrete situations where some competing entities interact through the use of some shared resources, and also because they always admit pure Nash equilibria which correspond to the local minima of a potential function. We explore the problem of computing a st...
The introduction of aggregator structures has proven effective in bringing fairness to energy resource allocation by negotiating for more resources and economic surplus on behalf of users. This paper extends the fair energy resource allocation problem to a multi-agent setting, focusing on interactions among multiple a...
Game theory offers a powerful framework for analyzing strategic interactions among decision-makers, providing tools to model, analyze, and predict their behavior. However, implementing game theory can be challenging due to difficulties in deriving solutions, understanding interactions, and ensuring optimal performance...
Mobile edge computing (MEC) paves the way to alleviate the burden of energy and computation of mobile users (MUs) by offloading tasks to the network edge. To enhance the MEC server utilization by optimizing its resource allocation, a well-designed pricing strategy is indispensable.
We formulate and study a general time-varying multi-agent system where players repeatedly compete under incomplete information. Our work is motivated by scenarios commonly observed in online advertising and retail marketplaces, where agents and platform designers optimize algorithmic decision-making in dynamic competi...
We study the computational complexity of bribery in parliamentary voting, in settings where the briber is (also) interested in the success of an entire set of political parties - a ``coalition'' - rather than an individual party. We introduce two variants of the problem: the Coalition-Bribery Problem (CB) and ...
We generalize the notion of convexity and average-convexity to the notion of weighted average-convexity. We show several results on the relation between weighted average-convexity and cooperative games.
We suggest a general method for inferring players' values from their actions in repeated games. The method extends and improves upon the recent suggestion of (Nekipelov et al., EC 2015) and is based on the assumption that players are more likely to exhibit sequences of actions that have lower regret.
Vehicle bypassing is known to negatively affect delays at traffic diverges. However, due to the complexities of this phenomenon, accurate and yet simple models of such lane change maneuvers are hard to develop.
We investigate the fair allocation of indivisible goods to agents with possibly different entitlements represented by weights. Previous work has shown that guarantees for additive valuations with existing envy-based notions cannot be extended to the case where agents have matroid-rank (i.e., binary submodular) valuati...
In the network creation game with n vertices, every vertex (a player) buys a set of adjacent edges, each at a fixed amount {\alpha} > 0. It has been conjectured that for {\alpha} >= n, every Nash equilibrium is a tree, and has been confirmed for every {\alpha} >= 273n.
We study an online model of fair division designed to capture features of a real world charity problem. We consider two simple mechanisms for this model in which agents simply declare what items they like.
We study non-monetary mechanisms for the fair and efficient allocation of reusable public resources, i.e., resources used for varying durations. We consider settings where a limited resource is repeatedly shared among a set of agents, each of whom may request to use the resource over multiple consecutive rounds, recei...
Mobile Crowdsensing has shown a great potential to address large-scale problems by allocating sensing tasks to pervasive Mobile Users (MUs). The MUs will participate in a Crowdsensing platform if they can receive satisfactory reward.
Ye showed recently that the simplex method with Dantzig pivoting rule, as well as Howard's policy iteration algorithm, solve discounted Markov decision processes (MDPs), with a constant discount factor, in strongly polynomial time. More precisely, Ye showed that both algorithms terminate after at most $O(\frac{mn}...
In this paper, a transmission-distribution systems flexibility market is introduced, in which system operators (SOs) jointly procure flexibility from different systems to meet their needs (balancing and congestion management) using a common market. This common market is, then, formulated as a cooperative game aiming a...
In mechanism design, the gold standard solution concepts are dominant strategy incentive compatibility and Bayesian incentive compatibility. These solution concepts relieve the (possibly unsophisticated) bidders from the need to engage in complicated strategizing.
Solving the road congestion problem is one of the most pressing issues in moderncities since it causes time wasting, pollution, higher industrial costs and huge roadmaintenance costs. Advances in ITS technologies and the advent of autonomousvehicles are changing mobility dramatically.
We consider markets consisting of a set of indivisible items, and buyers that have {\em sharp} multi-unit demand. This means that each buyer $i$ wants a specific number $d_i$ of items; a bundle of size less than $d_i$ has no value, while a bundle of size greater than $d_i$ is worth no more than the most valued $d_i$ i...
Neural networks have shown state-of-the-art performance in designing auctions, where the network learns the optimal allocations and payment rule to ensure desirable properties. Motivated by the same, we focus on learning fair division of resources, with no payments involved.
We examine sequential equilibrium in the context of computational games, where agents are charged for computation. In such games, an agent can rationally choose to forget, so issues of imperfect recall arise.
We present a budget pacing feature called Smart Fast Finish (SFF). SFF builds upon the industry standard Fast Finish (FF) feature in budget pacing systems that depletes remaining advertising budget as quickly as possible towards the end of some fixed time period.
This note, suitable for a lecture in an advanced undergraduate or basic graduate course on the economic theory of networks, exposits basic ideas of linear best-response games and their equilibria.
Given a set of items and a set of evaluators who all individually rank them, how do we aggregate these evaluations into a single societal ranking? Work in social choice and statistics has produced many aggregation methods for this problem, each with its desirable properties, but also with its limitations.
Information exchange systems differ in many ways, but all share a common vulnerability to selfish behavior and free-riding. In this paper, we build incentives schemes based on social norms.