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 Game Theory


Team-Fictitious Play for Reaching Team-Nash Equilibrium in Multi-team Games

Neural Information Processing Systems

Multi-team games, prevalent in robotics and resource management, involve team members striving for a joint best response against other teams. Team-Nash equilibrium (TNE) predicts the outcomes of such coordinated interactions. However, can teams of self-interested agents reach TNE? We introduce Team-Fictitious Play (Team-FP), a new variant of fictitious play where agents respond to the last actions of team members and the beliefs formed about other teams with some inertia in action updates. This design is essential in team coordination beyond the classical fictitious play dynamics.


Equilibrium Refinement for the Age of Machines: The One-Sided Quasi-Perfect Equilibrium

Neural Information Processing Systems

In two-player zero-sum extensive-form games, Nash equilibrium prescribes optimal strategies against perfectly rational opponents. However, it does not guarantee rational play in parts of the game tree that can only be reached by the players making mistakes. This can be problematic when operationalizing equilibria in the real world among imperfect players. Trembling-hand refinements are a sound remedy to this issue, and are subsets of Nash equilibria that are designed to handle the possibility that any of the players may make mistakes. In this paper, we initiate the study of equilibrium refinements for settings where one of the players is perfectly rational (the "machine") and the other may make mistakes.


Efficiency of the First-Price Auction in the Autobidding World

Neural Information Processing Systems

We study the price of anarchy of first-price auctions in the autobidding world, where bidders can be either utility maximizers (i.e., traditional bidders) or value maximizers (i.e., autobidders). We show that with autobidders only, the price of anarchy of first-price auctions is 1/2, and with both kinds of bidders, the price of anarchy degrades to about 0.457 (the precise number is given by an optimization).


Evaluate then Cooperate: Shapley-based View Cooperation Enhancement for Multi-view Clustering

Neural Information Processing Systems

The fundamental goal of deep multi-view clustering is to achieve preferable task performance through inter-view cooperation. Although numerous DMVC approaches have been proposed, the collaboration role of individual views have not been well investigated in existing literature. Moreover, how to further enhance view cooperation for better fusion still needs to be explored. In this paper, we firstly consider DMVC as an unsupervised cooperative game where each view can be regarded as a participant. Then, we introduce the Shapley value and propose a novel MVC framework termed Shapley-based Cooperation Enhancing Multi-view Clustering (SCE-MVC), which evaluates view cooperation with game theory. Specially, we employ the optimal transport distance between fused cluster distributions and single view component as the utility function for computing shapley values. Afterwards, we apply shapley values to assess the contribution of each view and utilize these contributions to promote view cooperation. Comprehensive experimental results well support the effectiveness of our framework adopting to existing DMVC frameworks, demonstrating the importance and necessity of enhancing the cooperation among views.


Intrinsic Robustness of Prophet Inequality to Strategic Reward Signaling Wei Tang Derek Zhu

Neural Information Processing Systems

Prophet inequality concerns a basic optimal stopping problem and states that simple threshold stopping policies -- i.e., accepting the first reward larger than a certain threshold -- can achieve tight


Computational Aspects of Bayesian Persuasion under Approximate Best Response

Neural Information Processing Systems

We study Bayesian persuasion under approximate best response, where the receiver may choose any action that is not too much suboptimal, given their posterior belief upon receiving the signal. We focus on the computational aspects of the problem, aiming to design algorithms that efficiently compute (almost) optimal strategies for the sender. Despite the absence of the revelation principle -- which has been one of the most powerful tools in Bayesian persuasion -- we design polynomial-time exact algorithms for the problem when either the state space or the action space is small, as well as a quasi-polynomial-time approximation scheme (QPTAS) for the general problem. On the negative side, we show there is no polynomial-time exact algorithm for the general problem unless P = NP. Our results build on several new algorithmic ideas, which might be useful in other principal-agent problems where robustness is desired.


Improved learning rates in multi-unit uniform price auctions Marius Potfer 1,2 Dorian Baudry 3 Hugo Richard 1

Neural Information Processing Systems

Motivated by the strategic participation of electricity producers in electricity dayahead market, we study the problem of online learning in repeated multi-unit uniform price auctions focusing on the adversarial opposing bid setting. The main contribution of this paper is the introduction of a new modeling of the bid space.


Autobidder's Dilemma: Why More Sophisticated Autobidders Lead to Worse Auction Efficiency

Neural Information Processing Systems

The recent increasing adoption of autobidding has inspired the growing interest in analyzing the performance of classic mechanism with value-maximizing autobidders both theoretically and empirically. It is known that optimal welfare can be obtained in first-price auctions if autobidders are restricted to uniform bid-scaling and the price of anarchy is 2 when non-uniform bid-scaling strategies are allowed. In this paper, we provide a fine-grained price of anarchy analysis for non-uniform bid-scaling strategies in first-price auctions, demonstrating the reason why more powerful (individual) non-uniform bid-scaling strategies may lead to worse (aggregated) performance in social welfare. Our theoretical results match recent empirical findings that a higher level of non-uniform bid-scaling leads to lower welfare performance in first-price auctions.


Long-term Causal Effects via Behavioral Game Theory

Neural Information Processing Systems

Planned experiments are the gold standard in reliably comparing the causal effect of switching from a baseline policy to a new policy. One critical shortcoming of classical experimental methods, however, is that they typically do not take into account the dynamic nature of response to policy changes. For instance, in an experiment where we seek to understand the effects of a new ad pricing policy on auction revenue, agents may adapt their bidding in response to the experimental pricing changes. Thus, causal effects of the new pricing policy after such adaptation period, the long-term causal effects, are not captured by the classical methodology even though they clearly are more indicative of the value of the new policy. Here, we formalize a framework to define and estimate long-term causal effects of policy changes in multiagent economies. Central to our approach is behavioral game theory, which we leverage to formulate the ignorability assumptions that are necessary for causal inference. Under such assumptions we estimate long-term causal effects through a latent space approach, where a behavioral model of how agents act conditional on their latent behaviors is combined with a temporal model of how behaviors evolve over time.