We initiate the study of the effects of non-transparency in decision rules on individuals' ability to improve in strategic learning settings. Inspired by real-life settings, such as loan approvals and college admissions, we remove the assumption typically made in the strategic learning literature, that the decision rule is fully known to individuals, and focus instead on settings where it is inaccessible. In their lack of knowledge, individuals try to infer this rule by learning from their peers (e.g., friends and acquaintances who previously applied for a loan), naturally forming groups in the population, each with possibly different type and level of information regarding the decision rule. We show that, in equilibrium, the principal's decision rule optimizing welfare across sub-populations may cause a strong negative externality: the true quality of some of the groups can actually deteriorate. On the positive side, we show that, in many natural cases, optimal improvement can be guaranteed simultaneously for all sub-populations. We further introduce a measure we term information overlap proxy, and demonstrate its usefulness in characterizing the disparity in improvements across sub-populations. Finally, we identify a natural condition under which improvement can be guaranteed for all sub-populations while maintaining high predictive accuracy. We complement our theoretical analysis with experiments on real-world datasets.
Strategic agents in incomplete-information environments have a conflicted relationship with uncertainty: it can keep them unpredictable to their opponents, but it must also be overcome to predict the actions of those opponents. We use a multivariate generalization of information theory to characterize the information processing behavior of strategic reasoning experts. We compare expert and novice poker players --- "sharks" and "fish" --- over 1.75 million hands of online two-player No-Limit Texas Hold'em (NLHE). Comparing the effects of privately known and publicly signaled information on wage…
We study a crowdsourcing problem where the platform aims to incentivize distributed workers to provide high quality and truthful solutions without the ability to verify the solutions. While most prior work assumes that the platform and workers have symmetric information, we study an asymmetric information scenario where the platform has informational advantages. Specifically, the platform knows more information regarding worker average solution accuracy, and can strategically reveal such information to workers. Workers will utilize the announced information to determine the likelihood that the…
The question of how people vote strategically under uncertainty has attracted much attention in several disciplines. Theoretical decision models have been proposed which vary in their assumptions on the sophistication of the voters and on the information made available to them about others' preferences and their voting behavior. This work focuses on modeling strategic voting behavior under poll information. It proposes a new heuristic for voting behavior that weighs the success of each candidate according to the poll score with the utility of the candidate given the voters' preferences. The mo…
We investigate the performance of concurrent remote sensing from independent strategic sources, whose goal is to minimize a linear combination of the freshness of information and the updating cost. In the literature, this is often investigated from a static perspective of setting the update rate of the sources a priori, either in a centralized optimal way or with a distributed game-theoretic approach. However, we argue that truly rational sources would better make such a decision with full awareness of the current age of information, resulting in a more efficient implementation of the updating…
Pricing for Information Revelation in Demand Response: A Strategic Communication Approach
CRAN Laboratory, Université de Lorraine, CNRS（洛林大学国家科学研究中心CRAN实验室）；Central South University（中南大学）；EDF Lab Paris-Saclay（法国电力集团巴黎萨克雷实验室）；College of Computing, University Mohammed VI Polytechnic（穆罕默德六世理工大学计算学院）；Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Princeton University（普林斯顿大学电气与计算机工程系）
This paper analyzes the fundamental limits of strate- gic communication in network settings. Strategic communication differs from the conventional communication paradigms in in- formation theory since it involves different objectives for the encoder and the decoder, which are aware of this mismatch and act accordingly. This leads to a Stackelberg game where both agents commit to their mappings ex-ante. Building on our prior work on the point-to-point setting, this paper studies the compression and communication problems with the receiver and/or transmitter side information setting. The equilib…
We study a class of two-player repeated games with incomplete information and informational externalities. In these games, two states are chosen at the outset, and players get private information on the pair, before engaging in repeated play. The payoff of each player only depends on his `own' state and on his own action. We study to what extent, and how, information can be exchanged in equilibrium. We prove that provided the private information of each player is valuable for the other player, the set of sequential equilibrium payoffs converges to the set of feasible and individually rational …
In the restructured electricity industry, electricity pooling markets are an oligopoly with strategic producers possessing private information (private production cost function). We focus on pooling markets where aggregate demand is represented by a non-strategic agent. Inelasticity of demand is a main difficulty in electricity markets which can potentially result in market failure and high prices. We consider demand to be inelastic. We propose a market mechanism that has the following features. (F1) It is individually rational. (F2) It is budget balanced. (F3) It is price efficient, that is, …
We study a setting where a receiver must design a questionnaire to recover a sequence of symbols known to strategic sender, whose utility may not be incentive compatible. We allow the receiver the possibility of selecting the alternatives presented in the questionnaire, and thereby linking decisions across the components of the sequence. We show that, despite the strategic sender and the noise in the channel, the receiver can recover exponentially many sequences, but also that exponentially many sequences are unrecoverable even by the best strategy. We define the growth rate of the number of r…
A digital security breach, by which confidential information is leaked, does not only affect the agent whose system is infiltrated, but is also detrimental to other agents socially connected to the infiltrated system. Although it has been argued that these externalities create incentives to under-invest in security, this presumption is challenged by the possibility of strategic adversaries that attack the least protected agents. In this paper we study a new model of security games in which agents share tokens of sensitive information in a network of contacts. The agents have the opportunity to…
Decision making in modern large-scale and complex systems such as communication networks, smart electricity grids, and cyber-physical systems motivate novel game-theoretic approaches. This paper investigates big strategic (non-cooperative) games where a finite number of individual players each have a large number of continuous decision variables and input data points. Such high-dimensional decision spaces and big data sets lead to computational challenges, relating to efforts in non-linear optimization scaling up to large systems of variables. In addition to these computational challenges, rea…
Strategic information design is a framework where a sender designs information strategically to steer its receiver's decision towards a desired choice. Traditionally, such frameworks have always assumed that the sender and the receiver comprehends the state of the choice environment, and that the receiver always trusts the sender's signal. This paper deviates from these assumptions and re-investigates strategic information design in the presence of distrustful receiver and when both sender and receiver cannot observe/comprehend the environment state space. Specifically, we assume that both sen…
The article considers strategies of coalitions that are based on intelligence information about moves of some of the other agents. The main technical result is a sound and complete logical system that describes the interplay between coalition power modality with intelligence and distributed knowledge modality in games with imperfect information.
To ensure that social networks (e.g. opinion consensus, cooperative estimation, distributed learning and adaptation etc.) proliferate and efficiently operate, the participating agents need to collaborate with each other by repeatedly sharing information. However, sharing information is often costly for the agents while resulting in no direct immediate benefit for them. Hence, lacking incentives to collaborate, strategic agents who aim to maximize their own individual utilities will withhold rather than share information, leading to inefficient operation or even collapse of networks. In this pa…
Bayesian rationality in strategic games presumes that it is possible to translate strategic uncertainty into imperfect information. Correlated equilibrium is guided by the idea that players are Bayes rational, have a common prior, and choose their strategies independently. I show that an essential condition for Bayesian rationality is violated in every game with imperfect information. Moreover, without strategic uncertainty, players cannot choose their strategies independently. This means strategic independence requires strategic uncertainty. If we distinguish between strategic certainty and u…
Traditional selfish routing literature quantifies inefficiency in transportation systems with single-attribute costs using price-of-anarchy (PoA), and provides various technical approaches (e.g. marginal cost pricing) to improve PoA of the overall network. Unfortunately, practical transportation systems have dynamic, multi-attribute costs and the state-of-the-art technical approaches proposed in the literature are infeasible for practical deployment. In this paper, we offer a paradigm shift to selfish routing via characterizing idiosyncratic, multi-attribute costs at boundedly-rational travele…
Modern financial market dynamics warrant detailed analysis due to their significant impact on the world. This, however, often proves intractable; massive numbers of agents, strategies and their change over time in reaction to each other leads to difficulties in both theoretical and simulational approaches. Notable work has been done on strategy dominance in stock markets with respect to the ratios of agents with certain strategies. Perfect knowledge of the strategies employed could then put an individual agent at a consistent trading advantage. This research reports the effects of imperfect or…
The COVID-19 lockdowns have created a significant socioeconomic impact on our society. In this paper, we propose a population vaccination game framework, called EPROACH, to design policies for reopenings that guarantee post-opening public health safety. In our framework, a population of players decides whether to vaccinate or not based on the public and private information they receive. The reopening is captured by the switching of the game state. The insights obtained from our framework include the appropriate vaccination coverage threshold for safe-reopening and information-based methods to …
We study a general class of dynamic games with asymmetric information where agents' beliefs are strategy dependent, i.e. signaling occurs. We show that the notion of sufficient information, introduced in the companion paper team, can be used to effectively compress the agents' information in a mutually consistent manner that is sufficient for decision-making purposes. We present instances of dynamic games with asymmetric information where we can characterize a time-invariant information state for each agent. Based on the notion of sufficient information, we define a class of equilibria for dyn…
IBM India Research Lab（IBM印度研究院）；Yahoo! Labs（雅虎实验室）；Dept. of CSA, IISc（印度科学理工学院计算机科学与自动化系）
We consider the problem of Probably Approximate Correct (PAC) learning of a binary classifier from noisy labeled examples acquired from multiple annotators (each characterized by a respective classification noise rate). First, we consider the complete information scenario, where the learner knows the noise rates of all the annotators. For this scenario, we derive sample complexity bound for the Minimum Disagreement Algorithm (MDA) on the number of labeled examples to be obtained from each annotator. Next, we consider the incomplete information scenario, where each annotator is strategic and ho…
Optimal network structure for collective performance with strategic information sharing
Peking University（北京大学）；Queen Mary University of London（伦敦大学玛丽女王学院）；CNRS UMR7225（法国国家科学研究中心联合研究实验室7225）；INRIA Paris（巴黎国家信息与自动化研究所）；INSERM U1127（法国国家健康与医学研究院联合研究单位1127）；AP-HP（巴黎公立医院集团）；KTH Royal Institute of Technology（瑞典皇家理工学院）；University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）；INFN（意大利国家核物理研究所）；Complexity Science Hub Vienna（维也纳复杂性科学中心）
We consider a class of sequential network interdiction problem settings where the interdictor has incomplete initial information about the network while the evader has complete knowledge of the network including its structure and arc costs. In each decision epoch, the interdictor can block (for the duration of the epoch) at most $k$ arcs known to him/her. By observing the evader's actions, the interdictor learns about the network structure and costs and thus, can adjust his/her actions in subsequent decision epochs. It is known from the literature that if the evader is greedy (i.e., the shorte…
We consider a sender-receiver game with an outside option for the sender. After the cheap talk phase, the receiver makes a proposal to the sender, which the latter can reject. We study situations in which the sender's approval is crucial to the receiver.We show that a partitional, (perfect Bayesian Nash) equilibrium exists if the sender has only two types or if the receiver's preferences over decisions do not depend on the type of the sender as long as the latter participates. The result does not extend: we construct a counter-example (with three types for the sender and type-dependent affine …
To Give or Not to Give? The Impacts of Strategically Withheld Recourse
MPI for Intelligent Systems（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所）；Tübingen AI Center（蒂宾根人工智能中心）；Bytedance Research（字节跳动研究院）；Washington University in Saint Louis（圣路易斯华盛顿大学）；University of California, Santa Cruz（加州大学圣克鲁兹分校）
We study the problem of information provision by a strategic central planner who can publicly signal about an uncertain infectious risk parameter. Signalling leads to an updated public belief over the parameter, and agents then make equilibrium choices on whether to work remotely or in-person. The planner maintains a set of desirable outcomes for each realization of the uncertain parameter and seeks to maximize the probability that agents choose an acceptable outcome for the true parameter. We distinguish between stateless and stateful objectives. In the former, the set of desirable outcomes d…
We consider a mechanism design problem for energy procurement, when there is one buyer and one seller, and the buyer is the mechanism designer. The seller can generate energy from conventional (deterministic) and renewable (random) plants, and has multi-dimensional private information which determines her production cost. The objective is to maximize the buyer's utility under the constraint that the seller voluntarily participates in the energy procurement process. We show that the optimal mechanism is a menu of contracts (nonlinear pricing) that the buyer offers to the seller, and the seller …
This paper analyzes the information disclosure problems originated in economics through the lens of information theory. Such problems are radically different from the conventional communication paradigms in information theory since they involve different objectives for the encoder and the decoder, which are aware of this mismatch and act accordingly. This leads, in our setting, to a hierarchical communication game, where the transmitter announces an encoding strategy with full commitment, and its distortion measure depends on a private information sequence whose realization is available at the…
Despite the prevalence of voting systems in the real world there is no consensus among researchers of how people vote strategically, even in simple voting settings. This paper addresses this gap by comparing different approaches that have been used to model strategic voting, including expected utility maximization, heuristic decisionmaking, and bounded rationality models. The models are applied to data collected from hundreds of people in controlled voting experiments, where people vote after observing non-binding poll information. We introduce a new voting model, the Attainability- Utility (A…
Strategic Delay and Coordination Efficiency in Global Games
King Abdullah University of Science and Technology（阿卜杜拉国王科技大学）；University of Illinois Urbana Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Florida State University（佛罗里达州立大学）
Learning to Strategically Acquire Resources in Competition
Harvard University（哈佛大学）；Morgan Stanley Machine Learning Research（摩根士丹利机器学习研究部）；University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）；Morgan Stanley（摩根士丹利）；Fixed Point Advisors（不动点顾问公司）
This paper contributes a new class of games called spacetime games with perfect information. In spacetime games, the agents make decisions at various positions in Minkowski spacetime. Spacetime games can be seen as the least common denominator of strategic games on the one hand, and dynamic games with perfect information on the other hand. Indeed, strategic games correspond to a configuration with only spacelike-separated decisions ("different rooms"). Dynamic games with perfect information, on the other hand, correspond to timelike-separated decisions ("in turn"). We show how to compute the s…
We consider a game-theoretic model of information retrieval with strategic authors. We examine two different utility schemes: authors who aim at maximizing exposure and authors who want to maximize active selection of their content (i.e. the number of clicks). We introduce the study of author learning dynamics in such contexts. We prove that under the probability ranking principle (PRP), which forms the basis of the current state of the art ranking methods, any better-response learning dynamics converges to a pure Nash equilibrium. We also show that other ranking methods induce a strategic env…
In many real-world strategic settings, people use information displays to make decisions. In these settings, an information provider chooses which information to provide to strategic agents and how to present it, and agents formulate a best response based on the information and their anticipation of how others will behave. We contribute the results of a controlled online experiment to examine how the provision and presentation of information impacts people's decisions in a congestion game. Our experiment compares how different visualization approaches for displaying this information, including…
Transmission of disease, spread of information and rumors, adoption of new products, and many other network phenomena can be fruitfully modeled as cascading processes, where actions chosen by nodes influence the subsequent behavior of neighbors in the network graph. Current literature on cascades tends to assume nodes choose myopically based on the state of choices already taken by other nodes. We examine the possibility of strategic choice, where agents representing nodes anticipate the choices of others who have not yet decided, and take into account their own influence on such choices. Our …
This paper studies a two-person linear-quadratic-Gaussian pursuit-evasion differential game with costly but controlled information. One player can decide when to observe the other player's state. However, one observation of another player's state comes with two costs: the direct cost of observing and the implicit cost of exposing his state. We call games of this type a Pursuit-Evasion-Exposure-Concealment (PEEC) game. The PEEC game constitutes two types of strategies: The control strategies and the observation strategies. We fully characterize the Nash control strategies of the PEEC game using…
