We consider a way to evaluate mechanisms without assuming mutual knowledge of rationality among the agents. More specifically, we assume that each agent can take any undominated strategy under a mechanism, and the mechanism is evaluated by its worst-case scenario. First, we provide some characteristics of a mechanism that implements a “strongly monotonic” social choice correspondence in an envi...

In program synthesis, we transform a speciication into a program that is guaranteed to satisfy the speciication. In synthesis of reactive systems, the environment in which the program operates may behave nondeterministically, e.g., by generating diierent sequences of inputs in diierent runs of the system. To satisfy the speciication, the program needs to act so that the speciication holds in ev...

We show how to adapt Terr’s variant of the babystep giant-step algorithm of Shanks to the computation of the regulator and of generators of principal ideals in real-quadratic number fields. The worst case complexity of the resulting algorithm depends only on the square root of the regulator, and is smaller than that of all other previously specified unconditional deterministic algorithm for thi...

Ship grounding is one of the primary maritime navigation casualties and a result of an error made by the navigating officer, of a technical failure on vital ship equipment or of force majeure. In order to decrease the risk of grounding in such cases, this paper explores the ship movement during navigation when an extraordinary event occurs, such as steering system failure that affects the vesse...

We study pure-strategy Nash equilibria in multi-player concurrent deterministic games, for a variety of preference relations. We provide a novel construction, called the suspect game, which transforms a multi-player concurrent game into a two-player turnbased game which turns Nash equilibria into winning strategies (for some objective that depends on the preference relations of the players in t...

In this paper, we present a framework for a mixed estimation scheme for hidden Markov models (HMM). A robust estimation scheme is first presented using the minimax method that minimizes a worst case cost for HMMs with bounded uncertainties. Then we present a mixed estimation scheme that minimizes a risk-neutral cost with a constraint on the worst-case cost. Some simulation results are also pres...

The paper questions the robustness of average case time complexity of the fast and popular quicksort algorithm. Among the six standard probability distributions examined in the paper, only continuous uniform, exponential and standard normal are supporting it whereas the others are supporting the worst case complexity measure. To the question -why are we getting the worst case complexity measure...

In this paper, we investigate the numerical solution of discrete time ,infinite horizon,stationary ,discounted Dynamic Programming(DP) problem. We introduce the worst case variant of the standard DP operator and show that it retains the nice properties of the former.We apply this worst case formulation to deterministic systems in continuous space and show that for a class of such systems, any a...

A “project manager” wishes to complete a project (e.g., a weaponsdevelopment program) as quickly as possible. Using a limited interdiction budget, an “interdictor” wishes to delay the project’s overall completion time by interdicting and thereby delaying some of the project’s component tasks. We explore a variety of PERT-based interdiction models for such problems and show that the resulting pr...

In three-dimensional computational topology, the theory of normal surfaces is a tool of great theoretical and practical significance. Although this theory typically leads to exponential time algorithms, very little is known about how these algorithms perform in “typical” scenarios, or how far the best known theoretical bounds are from the real worstcase scenarios. Here we study the combinatoria...