We propose the minimum approval mechanism (MAM) for a standard linear public good environment with two players. Players simultaneously and privately choose their contributions to the public good in the first stage. In the second stage, they simultaneously decide whether to approve the other’s choice. Both contribute what they choose in the first stage if both players approve; otherwise, both co...

In this paper, we provide polynomial and pseudopolynomial algorithms for classes of particular instances of interval data minmax regret graph problems. These classes are defined using a parameter that measures the distance from well known solvable instances. Tractable cases occur when the parameter is bounded by a constant.

Abstract In this paper, we study bottleneck identification in networks via extracting minimax paths. Many real-world have stochastic weights for which full knowledge is not available advance. Therefore, model task as a combinatorial semi-bandit problem to apply version of Thompson Sampling and establish an upper bound on the corresponding Bayesian regret. Due computational intractability proble...

These notes reflect the contents of the oral presentation of the paper Koolen and van Erven (2015) given in the journal club. After introducing the Hedge setting and providing some context, including a minimax regret bound, we discuss two kinds of adaptivity to “easy” data: second-order bounds and quantile bounds. We then describe the Squint algorithm proposed by Koolen and van Erven (2015) and...

We consider a pricing problem in an environment where the customers’ willingness-to-pay (WtP) distribution may change at some point over the selling horizon. Customers arrive sequentially and make purchase decisions based on a quoted price and their private reservation price. The seller knows the WtP distribution preand postchange, but does not know the time at which this change occurs. The per...

This paper introduces a convenient strategy for coding and predicting sequences of independent, identically distributed random variables generated from a large alphabet of size m. In particular, the size of the sample is allowed to be variable. The employment of a Poisson model and tilting method simplifies the implementation and analysis through independence. The resulting strategy is optimal ...

In this paper the minmax (regret) versions of some basic polynomially solvable deterministic network problems are discussed. It is shown that if the number of scenarios is unbounded, then the problems under consideration are not approximable within logK for any ǫ > 0 unless NP ⊆ DTIME(n log ), where K is the number of scenarios.

This paper compares the equilibrium threshold strategies of customers with different decision criteria in an observable queue with multiple vacations. Customers are not informed of the service time distribution and the state of the server, whereas they are told that the expected service time is an alternative of two values or the variable service time belongs to an interval. We find that both t...

Security is a critical concern around the world. Since resources for security are always limited, lots of interest have arisen in using game theory to handle security resource allocation problems. However, most of the existing work does not address adequately how a defender chooses his optimal strategy in a game with absent, inaccurate, uncertain, and even ambiguous strategy profiles’ payoffs. ...

The Unit Commitment Problem — one that is of great interest to energy providers — consists of finding an energy production plan in order to meet the forecasted demand. Unlike most of the existing solution methods, we adopt a ”robust” approach that takes into account the uncertainty around the forecasted demand. Performance is measured by estimating the savings achieved by the robust method over...