Investment in defense by all agents is a socially optimum equilibrium in many interdependent security scenarios. However, practically, some agents might still choose not to invest in security due to bounded rationality and errors, thus decreasing the total social welfare. Previous work shows that providing subsidies may help induce more agents to invest. Our study suggests that giving subsidies...

In this paper we prove that a graduated minimum wage rate can provide a Pareto improvement of an optimal allocation with nonlinear taxation. The reason is that a graduated minimum wage rate makes it harder for the more productive workers to mimic the income of the less productive workers. We also show that in a utilitarian social welfare optimum, the graduated minimum wage rate increases the co...

In this paper, we introduce an agent-based simulation for investigating the impact of social factors on the formation and evolution of task-oriented groups. Task-oriented groups are created explicitly to perform a task, and all members derive benefits from task completion. However, even in cases when all group members act in a way that is locally optimal for task completion, social forces that ...

We explore the evolution of the structure and performance of a social network in a population of individuals who search for local optima in diverse and dynamic task environments. Individuals choose whether to innovate or imitate and, in the latter case, from whom to learn. The probabilities of these possible actions respond to an individual’s past experiences using reinforcement learning. Among...

Recent developments in fitness landscape analysis include the study of Local Optima Networks (LON) and applications of the Elementary Landscapes theory. This paper represents a first step at combining these two tools to explore their ability to forecast the performance of search algorithms. We base our analysis on the Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAP) and conduct a large statistical study over...

We look at how the structure of social networks and the nature of social interactions affect the behaviour of Particle Swarms Optimisers. To this end, we propose a general model of communication and consensus which focuses on the effects of social interactions putting the details of the dynamics and the optimum seeking behaviour of PSOs into the background.

There are various applications where homotopy constraints are useful in trajectory generation for mobile robots. In this paper, we present a method to generate an optimal trajectory restricted to a particular homotopy class, which is specified by a given representative trajectory. The optimality is achieved by formulating the trajectory generation problem as a Mixed-Integer Quadratic Program (M...

However, independent results in several areas indicate added value to non-convex norm regularisation, despite the existence of local optima. Work in statistics (Fan & Li, 2001) and signal reconstruction (Wipf & Rao, 2005) have established the oracle properties of non-convex regularisers. Good empirical results were also reported in signal processing (Chartland, 2007) and SVM classification (Wes...

Recall that in the uncapacitated facility location problem we are given a set F of facilities and a set C of clients. There is a specified cost of opening a facility and specified distance between every pair i, j ∈ F ∪C. We assume that the distances satisfy the triangle inequality. The goal is to identify a set of facilities in F to serve all the clients in C such that the total facility and co...

An abstract optimization problem of minimizing a functional on a convex subset of a Banach space is considered. We discuss natural assumptions on the functional that permit to establish sufficient second-order optimality conditions with minimal gap with respect to the associated necessary ones. Though the two-norm discrepancy is taken into account, the obtained results exhibit the same formulat...