arXiv subjects

Sergey Norin

Publications and source records attributed to Sergey Norin.

75 records · Page 5Linked to original sources

arXiv2015

Sparse halves in dense triangle-free graphs

Erdős conjectured that every triangle-free graph $G$ on $n$ vertices contains a set of $\lfloor n/2 \rfloor$ vertices that spans at most $n^2 /50$ edges. Krivelevich proved the conjecture for graphs with minimum degree at least $\frac{2}{5}n$. Keevash and Sudakov improved this result to graphs with average degree at least $\frac{2}{5}n$. We strengthen these results by showing that the conjecture holds for graphs with minimum degree at least $\frac{5}{14}n$ and for graphs with average degree at least $(\frac{2}{5} - \varepsilon)n$ for some absolute $\varepsilon >0$. Moreover, we show that the conjecture is true for graphs which are close to the Petersen graph in edit distance.

math.CO↗

arXiv2014

A Near-Optimal Mechanism for Impartial Selection

We examine strategy-proof elections to select a winner amongst a set of agents, each of whom cares only about winning. This impartial selection problem was introduced independently by Holzman and Moulin and Alon et al. Fisher and Klimm showed that the permutation mechanism is impartial and $1/2$-optimal, that is, it selects an agent who gains, in expectation, at least half the number of votes of most popular agent. Furthermore, they showed the mechanism is $7/12$-optimal if agents cannot abstain in the election. We show that a better guarantee is possible, provided the most popular agent receives at least a large enough, but constant, number of votes. Specifically, we prove that, for any $ε>0$, there is a constant $N_ε$ (independent of the number $n$ of voters) such that, if the maximum number of votes of the most popular agent is at least $N_ε$ then the permutation mechanism is $(\frac{3}{4}-ε)$-optimal. This result is tight. Furthermore, in our main result, we prove that near-optimal impartial mechanisms exist. In particular, there is an impartial mechanism that is $(1-ε)$-optimal, for any $ε>0$, provided that the maximum number of votes of the most popular agent is at least a constant $M_ε$.

cs.GT↗

arXiv2014

Polylogarithmic Supports are required for Approximate Well-Supported Nash Equilibria below 2/3

In an epsilon-approximate Nash equilibrium, a player can gain at most epsilon in expectation by unilateral deviation. An epsilon well-supported approximate Nash equilibrium has the stronger requirement that every pure strategy used with positive probability must have payoff within epsilon of the best response payoff. Daskalakis, Mehta and Papadimitriou conjectured that every win-lose bimatrix game has a 2/3-well-supported Nash equilibrium that uses supports of cardinality at most three. Indeed, they showed that such an equilibrium will exist subject to the correctness of a graph-theoretic conjecture. Regardless of the correctness of this conjecture, we show that the barrier of a 2/3 payoff guarantee cannot be broken with constant size supports; we construct win-lose games that require supports of cardinality at least Omega((log n)^(1/3)) in any epsilon-well supported equilibrium with epsilon < 2/3. The key tool in showing the validity of the construction is a proof of a bipartite digraph variant of the well-known Caccetta-Haggkvist conjecture. A probabilistic argument shows that there exist epsilon-well-supported equilibria with supports of cardinality O(log n/(epsilon^2)), for any epsilon> 0; thus, the polylogarithmic cardinality bound presented cannot be greatly improved. We also show that for any delta > 0, there exist win-lose games for which no pair of strategies with support sizes at most two is a (1-delta)-well-supported Nash equilibrium. In contrast, every bimatrix game with payoffs in [0,1] has a 1/2-approximate Nash equilibrium where the supports of the players have cardinality at most two.

cs.GT↗