This paper focuses on the derivation of taxation mechanisms for improving system-level behavior in congestion games with unknown price-sensitive users. Here, a taxation mechanism represents a general rule for assigning local taxation functions to edges in a given network, e.g., Pigovian taxes or marginal-cost taxes. Recent results have identified taxation mechanisms that lead to optimal system-...

God created the natural numbers. All the rest is the work of man. Abstract The paper considers the problem of finding the largest possible set P(n), a subset of the set N of the natural numbers, with the property that a number is in P(n) if and only if it is a sum of n distinct naturals all in P(n) or none in P(n). Here " largest " is in the set theoretic sense and n≥2. We call P(n) a maximal s...

Channels of communication are presented as an emergent property of cooperative work. During actual interaction channels of communication are typically used in an intermittent fashion. Thus bandwidth is not an appropriate measure. Instead pace, the measure of the rate at which individual communications occur through a channel, is proposed as a primary property. We can relate this to the pace of ...

Given a prediction of opponent behavior in a generalsum two-player normal form game, it is difficult to select a strategy that balances the opportunity to use the prediction to inform one’s action with the risk of becoming predictable. We propose Restricted Stackelberg Response with Safety (RSRS), a novel way of generating such a strategy. RSRS uses an r-safe Stackelberg equilibrium in a modifi...

There are many algorithms for testing satisfiability — how to evaluate and compare them? It is common (but still disputable) to identify the efficiency of an algorithm with its worst-case complexity. From this point of view, asymptotic upper bounds on the worst-case running time and space is a criterion for evaluation and comparison of algorithms. In this chapter we survey ideas and techniques ...

Does past performance influence success in grant applications? In this study we test whether the grant allocation decisions of the Netherlands Research Council for the Economic and Social Sciences correlate with the past performances of the applicants in terms of publications and citations, and with the results of the peer review process organized by the Council. We show that the Council is suc...

Interactions between evolution and lifetime learning are of great interest to studies of adaptive behaviour both in the natural world and the field of evolutionary computation. This contribution revisits an earlier discovered observation that the average performance of a population of neural networks which are evolved to solve one task is improved by lifetime learning on a different task. Two e...

We investigate the worst-case behavior of the simplex algorithm on linear programs with three variables, that is, on 3-dimensional simple polytopes. Among the pivot rules that we consider, the “random edge” rule yields the best asymptotic behavior as well as the most complicated analysis. All other rules turn out to be much easier to study, but also produce worse results: Most of them show esse...

Many papers have studied the probability of majority cycles, also called the Condorcet paradox, using the impartial culture or related distributional assumptions. While it is widely acknowledged that the impartial culture is unrealistic, conclusions drawn from the impartial culture are nevertheless still widely advertised and reproduced in textbooks. We demonstrate that the impartial culture is...

ÐThe coterie join operation proposed by Neilsen and Mizuno produces, from a k-coterie and a coterie, a new k-coterie. For the coterie join operation, this paper first shows 1) a necessary and sufficient condition to produce a nondominated k-coterie (more accurately, a nondominated k-semicoterie satisfying Nonintersection Property) and 2) a sufficient condition to produce a k-coterie with higher...