SearcharxivSearch

arXiv · 2403.12204

Information Compression in Dynamic Information Disclosure Games

Abstract

We consider a two-player dynamic information design problem between a principal and a receiver -- a game is played between the two agents on top of a Markovian system controlled by the receiver's actions, where the principal obtains and strategically shares some information about the underlying system with the receiver in order to influence their actions. In our setting, both players have long-term objectives, and the principal sequentially commits to their strategies instead of committing at the beginning. Further, the principal cannot directly observe the system state, but at every turn they can choose randomized experiments to observe the system partially. The principal can share details about the experiments to the receiver. For our analysis we impose the truthful disclosure rule: the principal is required to truthfully announce the details and the result of each experiment to the receiver immediately after the experiment result is revealed. Based on the received information, the receiver takes an action when its their turn, with the action influencing the state of the underlying system. We show that there exist Perfect Bayesian equilibria in this game where both agents play Canonical Belief Based (CBB) strategies using a compressed version of their information, rather than full information, to choose experiments (for the principal) or actions (for the receiver). We also provide a backward inductive procedure to solve for an equilibrium in CBB strategies.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

BibTeXRIS

Dengwang Tang, Vijay G. Subramanian. 2024-03-18. Information Compression in Dynamic Information Disclosure Games. https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.12204

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

MMS Allocation for Chores with Online Agent Arrivals

We study the fair allocation of $m$ indivisible chores to $n$ agents with subadditive cost functions arriving online in an arbitrary order. Upon an agent's arrival, we are informed of her cost function and must irrevocably assign her a set of chores. We focus on the Maximin Share (MMS) fairness notion and aim to compute an allocation in which all items are assigned, and no agent incurs a cost more than $\alpha$ times her MMS. Without any prior information about the instance (other than $n$ and $m$), we design an algorithm with a competitive ratio of $O(\min\{n, k\log^{1+\epsilon}k, \log m\})$ for any constant $\epsilon > 0$, where $k$ denotes the number of cost function types. Our bound matches the best known offline approximation guarantees for MMS under subadditive costs and is nearly optimal with respect to all three parameters: we show that even for binary additive cost functions, no online algorithm can achieve a competitive ratio of $o(\min\{n, k\log k, \log m\})$. We then consider the setting in which the $k$ cost function types are known in advance (though the realized types of arriving agents are not). For additive cost functions, we provide an algorithm with a competitive ratio of $O(\min\{\log k, \log(kn)/\log\log(kn)\})$, and show that constant-competitive algorithms do not exist for general $k$, even for the binary additive setting. For binary additive functions when $k \le n$, we propose a $3$-competitive algorithm and establish a lower bound of $2$.

cs.GT

Truncated Noisy Best-Response Algorithms: Toward Game Theoretic Learning with Safety Guarantees

We consider a game theoretic approach to solve multi-agent coordination problems with submodular maximization objectives. It is known for such problems that the Nash equilibria for the corresponding game are always within 50% of the optimal, but that the equilibria which achieve this worst-case bound are not stable. To exploit this instability, we propose a family of algorithms which we call Truncated Noisy Best-Response (TNBR) Algorithms. These algorithms are flexibly characterized by agents asynchronously and stochastically selecting actions from a neighbourhood of their best response payoffs. We compute bounds on the recurrent classes of TNBR algorithms' associated Markov chains. Our bounds fall into two categories: first, "Performance" bounds ensure that TNBR algorithms always have a high-value recurrent state; second, "Safety" bounds ensure that TNBR algorithms never have arbitrarily-bad recurrent states. Furthermore, these two types of bounds are linked by a waterbed-like effect: every game with a poor Safety guarantee necessarily has a favorable Performance guarantee.

cs.GT

Existence of the Core in Approval-Based Committee Elections

We settle the main open question in the theory of approval-based multi-winner elections: we show that there always exists a committee in the core. The core is a stability and group fairness concept. The proof introduces a new voting rule that optimizes an entropy-like objective function over committees and payment systems. All local optima of this objective function lie in the core, which implies that a core committee can be found in polynomial time.

cs.GT