SearcharxivSearch

arXiv · 2606.10720

A Pigouvian Matchmaker Mechanism for De-escalating the AGI Race

Abstract

A formal mechanism is presented in which a willing regulator-matchmaker fosters cooperation on resources among participants in the AGI race, collects a Pigouvian tax based on the speed-up it induces, and invests the proceeds into alignment research. The construction is derived in the continuous-time options framework of Tan (2025) in which cooperation is treated as a jump in the underlying asset value of participating players, the Pigouvian component is matched to the marginal effect of increasing expected loss, and the total collected fund endogenizes the rate of learning on safety. It is shown how the framework allows for determining participation and optimal activity levels. Conditions under which it is optimal to enter the market are derived, and it is proven that if the orthogonality condition holds between the supported portfolio and the abilities component, the Suicide Region collapses at finite time, and the upper bound for this time is derived as sum of a deterministic and random term. Finally, if orthogonality is violated, it is proven that enhancing matchmaker capacity does not recover the market's superiority. The construction links research areas including two-sided markets, Pigouvian taxes, self-regulatory organizations, private law enforcement, evolutionary modeling of AI races, real options and option games, measurement of comparative progress and analysis of the Suicide Region.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Eduard Kapelko. 2026-06-09. A Pigouvian Matchmaker Mechanism for De-escalating the AGI Race. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.10720

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