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In most contemporary approaches to decision making, a decision problem is described by a sets of states and set of outcomes, and a rich set of acts, which are functions from states to outcomes over which the decision maker (DM) has preferences. Most interesting decision problems, however, do not come with a state spac...
This paper examines the integration of computational complexity into game theoretic models. The example focused on is the Prisoner's Dilemma, repeated for a finite length of time.
Blockchain has recently been applied in many applications such as bitcoin, smart grid, and Internet of Things (IoT) as a public ledger of transactions. However, the use of blockchain in mobile environments is still limited because the mining process consumes too much computing and energy resources on mobile devices.
We consider multi-item exchange markets in which agents want to receive one of their target bundles of resources. The model encompasses well-studied markets for kidney exchange, lung exchange, and multi-organ exchange.
One aspect of the algorithmic lens in theoretical computer science is a view on other scientific disciplines that focuses on satisfactory solutions that adhere to real-world constraints, as opposed to solutions that would be optimal ignoring such constraints. The algorithmic lens has provided a unique and important pe...
In many settings, people exhibit behavior that is inconsistent across time --- we allocate a block of time to get work done and then procrastinate, or put effort into a project and then later fail to complete it. An active line of research in behavioral economics and related fields has developed and analyzed models fo...
We consider finite-state Markov decision processes with the combined Energy-MeanPayoff objective. The controller tries to avoid running out of energy while simultaneously attaining a strictly positive mean payoff in a second dimension.
Can noncooperative behaviour of merchants lead to a market split that prima facie seems anticompetitive? We introduce a model in which service providers, with ISPs being the main example, aim at optimizing the number of customers using their services, while customers aim at choosing service providers with low customer...
Online content platforms commonly use engagement-based optimization when making recommendations. This encourages content creators to invest in quality, but also rewards gaming tricks such as clickbait.
In this work, we provide a structural characterization of the possible Nash equilibria in the well-studied class of security games with additive utility. Our analysis yields a classification of possible equilibria into seven types and we provide closed-form feasibility conditions for each type as well as closed-form e...
One major function of social networks (e.g., massive online social networks) is the dissemination of information such as scientific knowledge, news, and rumors. Information can be propagated by the users of the network via natural connections in written, oral or electronic form.
This paper considers a cognitive radio network in which each secondary user selects a primary user to assist in order to get a chance of accessing the primary user channel. Thus, each group of secondary users assisting the same primary user forms a coaltion.
Secure equilibrium is a refinement of Nash equilibrium, which provides some security to the players against deviations when a player changes his strategy to another best response strategy. The concept of secure equilibrium is specifically developed for assume-guarantee synthesis and has already been applied in this co...
The works of (Daskalakis et al., 2009, 2022; Jin et al., 2022; Deng et al., 2023) indicate that computing Nash equilibria in multi-player Markov games is a computationally hard task. This fact raises the question of whether or not computational intractability can be circumvented if one focuses on specific classes of M...
Voters from m disjoint constituencies (regions, federal states, etc.) are represented in an assembly which contains one delegate from each constituency and applies a weighted voting rule. All agents are assumed to have single-peaked preferences over an interval; each delegate's preferences match his constituency&#...
This paper presents the research on the interdisciplinary research infrastructure for understanding human reasoning in game-theoretic terms. Strategic reasoning is considered to impact human decision making in social, economical and competitive interactions.
We study a problem where a group of agents has to decide how some fixed value should be shared among them. We are interested in settings where the share that each agent receives is based on how that agent is evaluated by other members of the group, where highly regarded agents receive a greater share compared to agent...
Cheung and Piliouras (2020) recently showed that two variants of the Multiplicative Weights Update method - OMWU and MWU - display opposite convergence properties depending on whether the game is zero-sum or cooperative. Inspired by this work and the recent literature on learning to optimize for single functions, we i...
The rise of Generative AI (GenAI) is reshaping how workers contribute to shared projects. While workers can use GenAI to boost productivity or reduce effort, managers may use it to replace some workers entirely.
Algorithmic stablecoins (AS) are one special type of stablecoins that are not backed by any asset (equiv. without collateral). They stand to revolutionize the way a sovereign fiat operates.
The Nash equilibrium paradigm, and Rational Choice Theory in general, rely on agents acting independently from each other. This note shows how this assumption is crucial in the definition of Rational Choice Theory.
In this work, we study the social learning problem, in which agents of a networked system collaborate to detect the state of the nature based on their private signals. A novel distributed graphical evolutionary game theoretic learning method is proposed.
We consider the manipulability of tournament rules, in which $n$ teams play a round robin tournament and a winner is (possibly randomly) selected based on the outcome of all $\binom{n}{2}$ matches. Prior work defines a tournament rule to be $k$-SNM-$\alpha$ if no set of $\leq k$ teams can fix the $\leq \binom{k}{2}$ m...
Blackwell approachability, regret minimization and calibration are three criteria evaluating a strategy (or an algorithm) in different sequential decision problems, or repeated games between a player and Nature. Although they have at first sight nothing in common, links between have been discovered: both consistent an...
Partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) are standard models for dynamic systems with probabilistic and nondeterministic behaviour in uncertain environments. We prove that in POMDPs with long-run average objective, the decision maker has approximately optimal strategies with finite memory.
In many online systems, individuals provide services for each other; the recipient of the service obtains a benefit but the provider of the service incurs a cost. If benefit exceeds cost, provision of the service increases social welfare and should therefore be encouraged -- but the individuals providing the service g...
In this paper we study how to play (stochastic) games optimally using little space. We focus on repeated games with absorbing states, a type of two-player, zero-sum concurrent mean-payoff games.
Pursuit-evasion scenarios appear widely in robotics, security domains, and many other real-world situations. We focus on two-player pursuit-evasion games with concurrent moves, infinite horizon, and discounted rewards.
The discrete sell or hold problem (DSHP), which is introduced in \cite{H12}, is studied under the constraint that each asset can only take a constant number of different values. We show that if each asset can take only two values, the problem becomes polynomial-time solvable.
Control reserves are power generation or consumption entities that ensure balance of supply and demand of electricity in real-time. In many countries, they are operated through a market mechanism in which entities provide bids.
We study the deterministic and randomized query complexity of finding approximate equilibria in bimatrix games. We show that the deterministic query complexity of finding an $\epsilon$-Nash equilibrium when $\epsilon < \frac{1}{2}$ is $\Omega(k^2)$, even in zero-one constant-sum games.
Kidney transplantation is the preferred treatment for end-stage renal disease, yet the scarcity of donors and inefficiencies in allocation systems create major bottlenecks, resulting in prolonged wait times and alarming mortality rates. Despite their severe scarcity, timely and effective interventions to prevent non-u...
The rapid development of drone technology is leading to more and more use cases being proposed. In response, regulators are drawing up drone traffic management frameworks.
Commitment devices are powerful tools that can influence and incentivise certain behaviours by linking them to rewards or punishments. These devices are particularly useful in decision-making, as they can steer individuals towards specific choices.
We study the problem of fairly assigning a set of discrete tasks (or chores) among a set of agents with additive valuations. Each chore is associated with a start and finish time, and each agent can perform at most one chore at any given time.
We study the design and approximation of optimal crowdsourcing contests. Crowdsourcing contests can be modeled as all-pay auctions because entrants must exert effort up-front to enter.
This paper describes an engine to optimize web publisher revenues from second-price auctions. These auctions are widely used to sell online ad spaces in a mechanism called real-time bidding (RTB).
In this paper, we propose a family of approval voting-schemes for electing committees based on the preferences of voters. In our schemes, we calculate the vector of distances of the possible committees from each of the ballots and, for a given $ p $-norm, choose the one that minimizes the magnitude of the distance vec...
We consider massively dense ad hoc networks and study their continuum limits as the node density increases and as the graph providing the available routes becomes a continuous area with location and congestion dependent costs. We study both the global optimal solution as well as the non-cooperative routing problem amo...
Abraham, Dolev, Geffner, and Halpern proved that, in asynchronous systems, a $(k,t)$-robust equilibrium for $n$ players and a trusted mediator can be implemented without the mediator as long as $n > 4(k+t)$, where an equilibrium is $(k,t)$-robust if, roughly speaking, no coalition of $t$ players can decrease the pay...
Weighted voting games apply to a wide variety of multi-agent settings. They enable the formalization of power indices which quantify the coalitional power of players.
We consider a general multi-connectivity framework, intended for ultra-reliable low-latency communications (URLLC) services, and propose a novel, preallocation-based combinatorial auction approach for the efficient allocation of channels. We compare the performance of the proposed method with several other state-of-th...
This paper studies an online selection problem, where a seller seeks to sequentially sell multiple copies of an item to arriving buyers. We consider an adversarial setting, making no modeling assumptions about buyers' valuations for the items except acknowledging a finite support.
Consider a round-robin tournament on n teams, where a winner must be (possibly randomly) selected as a function of the results from the ${n \choose 2}$ pairwise matches. A tournament rule is said to be k-SNM-${\alpha}$ if no set of k teams can ever manipulate the ${k \choose 2}$ pairwise matches between them to improv...
We study the problem of dividing indivisible chores among agents whose costs (for the chores) are supermodular set functions with binary marginals. Such functions capture complementarity among chores, i.e., they constitute an expressive class wherein the marginal disutility of each chore is either one or zero, and the...
An heuristic approach to compute strong Nash (Aumann) equilibria is presented. The method is based on differential evolution and three variants of a generative relation for strong Nash equilibria characterization.
Proportional representation (PR) is one of the central principles in voting. Elegant rules with compelling PR axiomatic properties have the potential to be adopted for several important collective decision making settings.
Consider a hiring process with candidates coming from different universities. It is easy to order candidates with the same background, yet it can be challenging to compare them otherwise.
We consider job scheduling settings, with multiple machines, where jobs arrive online and choose a machine selfishly so as to minimize their cost. Our objective is the classic makespan minimization objective, which corresponds to the completion time of the last job to complete.
Real-time bidding (RTB) based display advertising has become one of the key technological advances in computational advertising. RTB enables advertisers to buy individual ad impressions via an auction in real-time and facilitates the evaluation and the bidding of individual impressions across multiple advertisers.
Motivated by civic problems such as participatory budgeting and multiwinner elections, we consider the problem of public good allocation: Given a set of indivisible projects (or candidates) of different sizes, and voters with different monotone utility functions over subsets of these candidates, the goal is to choose a...
We study an auction with $m$ identical items in a context where $n$ agents can arbitrarily commit to strategies. In general, such commitments non-trivially change the equilibria by inducing a metagame of choosing which strategies to commit to.
The aim of this of this paper is to study infinite games and to prove formally some properties in this framework. As a consequence we show that the behavior (the madness) of people which leads to speculative crashes or escalation can be fully rational.
In this paper, we develop a new method for finding an optimal biddingstrategy in sequential auctions, using a dynamic programming technique. Theexisting method assumes that the utility of a user is represented in anadditive form.
Delay games are two-player games of infinite duration in which one player may delay her moves to obtain a lookahead on her opponent's moves. We consider delay games with winning conditions expressed in weak monadic second order logic with the unbounding quantifier, which is able to express (un)boundedness properti...
We show that the existence of a computationally efficient calibration algorithm, with a low weak calibration rate, would imply the existence of an efficient algorithm for computing approximate Nash equilibria - thus implying the unlikely conclusion that every problem in PPAD is solvable in polynomial time.
We develop efficient algorithms to construct utility maximizing mechanisms in the presence of risk averse players (buyers and sellers) in Bayesian settings. We model risk aversion by a concave utility function, and players play strategically to maximize their expected utility.
Deep reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved outstanding results in recent years, which has led a dramatic increase in the number of methods and applications. Recent works are exploring learning beyond single-agent scenarios and considering multi-agent scenarios.
Assignment markets involve matching with transfers, as in labor markets and housing markets. We consider a two-sided assignment market with agent types and stochastic structure similar to models used in empirical studies, and characterize the size of the core in such markets.
Network creation games are well-established for investigating the decentralized formation of communication networks, like the Internet or social networks. In these games, selfish agents that correspond to network nodes strategically create costly edges to maximize their centrality in the formed network.
Kidney Exchange Programmes (KEPs) facilitate the exchange of kidneys, and larger pools of recipient-donor pairs tend to yield proportionally more transplants, leading to the proposal of international KEPs (IKEPs). However, as studied by \citet{mincu2021ip}, practical limitations must be considered in IKEPs to ensure t...
"Control" studies attempts to set the outcome of elections through the addition, deletion, or partition of voters or candidates. The set of benchmark control types was largely set in the seminal 1992 paper by Bartholdi, Tovey, and Trick that introduced control, and there now is a large literature studying how ...
An important challenge in robust machine learning is when training data is provided by strategic sources who may intentionally report erroneous data for their own benefit. A line of work at the intersection of machine learning and mechanism design aims to deter strategic agents from reporting erroneous training data b...
Networked public goods games model scenarios in which self-interested agents decide whether or how much to invest in an action that benefits not only themselves, but also their network neighbors. Examples include vaccination, security investment, and crime reporting.
This manuscript investigates the relationship between Blackwell Approachability, a stochastic vector-valued repeated game, and minimax theory, a single-play scalar-valued scenario. First, it is established in a general setting --- one not permitting invocation of minimax theory --- that Blackwell's Approachability...
We study the communication complexity of dominant strategy implementations of combinatorial auctions. We start with two domains that are generally considered "easy": multi-unit auctions with decreasing marginal values and combinatorial auctions with gross substitutes valuations.
As the fusion of automotive industry and metaverse, vehicular metaverses establish a bridge between the physical space and virtual space, providing intelligent transportation services through the integration of various technologies, such as extended reality and real-time rendering technologies, to offer immersive metav...
As the number of prosumers with distributed energy resources (DERs) grows, the conventional centralized operation scheme may suffer from conflicting interests, privacy concerns, and incentive inadequacy. In this paper, we propose an energy sharing mechanism to address the above challenges.
This paper examines the performance trade-offs between an introduced linear flexibility market model for congestion management and a benchmark second-order cone programming (SOCP) formulation. The linear market model incorporates voltage magnitudes and reactive powers, while providing a simpler formulation than the SO...
Solving Nash equilibrium is the key challenge in normal-form games with large strategy spaces, where open-ended learning frameworks offer an efficient approach. In this work, we propose an innovative unified open-ended learning framework A-PSRO, i.e., Advantage Policy Space Response Oracle, as a comprehensive framewor...
We consider a two-player network inspection game, in which a defender allocates sensors with potentially heterogeneous detection capabilities in order to detect multiple attacks caused by a strategic attacker. The objective of the defender (resp. attacker) is to minimize (resp. maximize) the expected number of undetec...
Understanding the emergence and sustainability of cooperation is a fundamental problem in evolutionary biology and is frequently studied by the framework of evolutionary game theory. A very powerful mechanism to promote cooperation is network reciprocity, where the interaction patterns and opportunities for strategy s...
We show that economic conclusions derived from Bulow and Roberts (1989) for linear utility models approximately extend to non-linear utility models. Specifically, we quantify the extent to which agents with non-linear utilities resemble agents with linear utilities, and we show that the approximation of mechanisms for...
We formalize an allocation model under ordinal preferences that is more general than the well-studied Shapley-Scarf housing market. In our model, the agents do not just care which house or resource they get but also care about who gets their own resource.
We consider the bilateral trade problem, in which two agents trade a single indivisible item. It is known that the only dominant-strategy truthful mechanism is the fixed-price mechanism: given commonly known distributions of the buyer's value $B$ and the seller's value $S$, a price $p$ is offered to both agent...
The window mechanism was introduced by Chatterjee et al. to reinforce mean-payoff and total-payoff objectives with time bounds in two-player turn-based games on graphs. It has since proved useful in a variety of settings, including parity objectives in games and both mean-payoff and parity objectives in Markov decisio...
We consider an example of stochastic games with partial, asymmetric and non-classical information. We obtain relevant equilibrium policies using a new approach which allows managing the belief updates in a structured manner.
In many settings, there is an organizer who would like to divide a set of agents into $k$ coalitions, and cares about the friendships within each coalition. Specifically, the organizer might want to maximize utilitarian social welfare, maximize egalitarian social welfare, or simply guarantee that every agent will have...
We develop a flexible stochastic approximation framework for analyzing the long-run behavior of learning in games (both continuous and finite). The proposed analysis template incorporates a wide array of popular learning algorithms, including gradient-based methods, the exponential/multiplicative weights algorithm for...
We consider a firm that sells a large number of products to its customers in an online fashion. Each product is described by a high dimensional feature vector, and the market value of a product is assumed to be linear in the values of its features.
Social punishment has been suggested as a key approach to ensuring high levels of cooperation and norm compliance in one-shot (i.e. non-repeated) interactions. However, it has been shown that it only works when punishment is highly cost-efficient.
We develop an analytical framework for distribution of popular content in an Information Centric Network (ICN) that comprises of Access ICNs, a Transit ICN and a Content Provider. Using a generalized Zipf distribution to model content popularity, we devise a game theoretic approach to jointly determine caching and pri...
Suppose each of $n$ men and $n$ women is located at a point in a metric space. A woman ranks the men in order of their distance to her from closest to farthest, breaking ties at random.
The Smart Grid System (SGS) is a joint network comprising the power and the communication network. In this paper, the underlying intra-and-interdependencies between entities for a given SGS is captured using a dependency model called Modified Implicative Interdependency Model (MIIM) [1].
We study the two-agent single-item bilateral trade. Ideally, the trade should happen whenever the buyer's value for the item exceeds the seller's cost.
We consider the classic problem of fairly dividing a heterogeneous good ("cake") among several agents with different valuations. Classic cake-cutting procedures either allocate each agent a collection of disconnected pieces, or assume that the cake is a one-dimensional interval.
The goal of this paper is to develop a generic framework for converting modern optimization algorithms into mechanisms where inputs come from self-interested agents. We focus on aggregating preferences from $n$ players in a context without money.
In e-commerce advertising, it is crucial to jointly consider various performance metrics, e.g., user experience, advertiser utility, and platform revenue. Traditional auction mechanisms, such as GSP and VCG auctions, can be suboptimal due to their fixed allocation rules to optimize a single performance metric (e.g., r...
Proportional ranking rules aggregate approval-style preferences of agents into a collective ranking such that groups of agents with similar preferences are adequately represented. Motivated by the application of live Q&A platforms, where submitted questions need to be ranked based on the interests of the audience,...
In the future, artificial learning agents are likely to become increasingly widespread in our society. They will interact with both other learning agents and humans in a variety of complex settings including social dilemmas.
A zero-sum two-person Perfect Information Semi-Markov game (PISMG) under limiting ratio average payoff has a value and both the maximiser and the minimiser have optimal pure semi-stationary strategies. We arrive at the result by first fixing an arbitrary initial state and forming the matrix of undiscounted payoffs cor...
We study the open question of how players learn to play a social optimum pure-strategy Nash equilibrium (PSNE) through repeated interactions in general-sum coordination games. A social optimum of a game is the stable Pareto-optimal state that provides a maximum return in the sum of all players' payoffs (social wel...
We study the robustness of approval-based participatory budgeting (PB) rules to random noise in the votes. Our contributions are twofold.
Diffusion auction is an emerging business model where a seller aims to incentivise buyers in a social network to diffuse the auction information thereby attracting potential buyers. We focus on designing mechanisms for multi-unit diffusion auctions.
We consider two sided matching markets consisting of agents with non-transferable utilities; agents from the opposite sides form matching pairs (e.g., buyers-sellers) and negotiate the terms of their math which may include a monetary transfer. Competitive equilibria are the elements of the core of this game.
Finding optimal solutions for multi-unit combinatorial auctions is a hard problem and finding approximations to the optimal solution is also hard. We investigate the use of Branch-and-Bound techniques: they require both a way to bound from above the value of the best allocation and a good criterion to decide which bid...
This paper addresses the matter of inequality in network formation games. We employ a quantity that we are calling the Nash Inequality Ratio (NIR), defined as the maximal ratio between the highest and lowest costs incurred to individual agents in a Nash equilibrium strategy, to characterize the extent to which inequal...
We design mechanisms for online procurement of data held by strategic agents for machine learning tasks. The challenge is to use past data to actively price future data and give learning guarantees even when an agent's cost for revealing her data may depend arbitrarily on the data itself.
Control systems will play a pivotal role in addressing societal-scale challenges as they drive the development of sustainable future smart cities. At the heart of these challenges is the trustworthy, fair, and efficient allocation of scarce public resources, including renewable energy, transportation, data, computatio...
We study deregulated power markets with strategic power suppliers. In deregulated markets, each supplier submits its supply function (i.e., the amount of electricity it is willing to produce at various prices) to the independent system operator (ISO), who based on the submitted supply functions, dispatches the supplie...