It is well known that a player in a non-cooperative game can benefit by publicly restricting his possible moves before play begins. We show that, more generally, a player may benefit by publicly committing to pay an external party an amount that is contingent on the game’s outcome. We explore...

This paper examines a general model of sales contests in which agents have heterogeneous attitudes toward risk. It shows that agents that are less risk averse have a higher probability of success. A corollary to this result shows that when absolute risk aversion is decreasing in wealth,...

We consider the problem of designing (perhaps massively distributed) collectives of computational processes to maximize a provided "world utility" function. We consider this problem when the behavior of each process in the collective can be cast as striving to maximize its own payoff utility...

Recent work has shown how information theory extends conventional full-rationality game theory to allow bounded rational agents. The associated mathematical framework can be used to solve distributed optimization and control problems. This is done by translating the distributed problem into an...

A major factor affecting a person's happiness is the gap between their income and their neighbors', independent of their own income. This effect is strongest when the neighbor has moderately higher income. In addition a person's lifetime happiness often follows a "U" shape. Previous models have...