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We study the computation of equilibria in prediction markets in perhaps the most fundamental special case with two players and three trading opportunities. To do so, we show equivalence of prediction market equilibria with those of a simpler signaling game with commitment introduced by Kong and Schoenebeck (2018). We then extend their results by giving computationally efficient algorithms for additional parameter regimes. Our approach leverages a new connection between prediction markets and Bayesian persuasion, which also reveals interesting conceptual insights.
Prediction markets are powerful tools to elicit and aggregate beliefs from strategic agents. However, in current prediction markets, agents may exhaust the social welfare by competing to be the first to update the market. We initiate the study of the trade-off between how quickly information is aggregated by the market, and how much this information costs. We design markets to aggregate timely information from strategic agents to maximize social welfare. To this end, the market must incentivize agents to invest the correct amount of effort to acquire information: quickly enough to be useful, but not faster (and more expensively) than necessary. The market also must ensure that agents report their information truthfully and on time. We consider two settings: in the first, information is only valuable before a deadline; in the second, the value of information decreases as time passes. We use both theorems and simulations to demonstrate the mechanisms.
The Arrow-Debreu extension of the classic Hylland-Zeckhauser scheme for a one-sided matching market -- called ADHZ in this paper -- has natural applications but has instances which do not admit equilibria. By introducing approximation, we define the $epsilon$-approximate ADHZ model, and we give the following results. * Existence of equilibrium under linear utility functions. We prove that the equilibrium satisfies Pareto optimality, approximate envy-freeness, and approximate weak core stability. * A combinatorial polynomial-time algorithm for an $epsilon$-approximate ADHZ equilibrium for the case of dichotomous, and more generally bi-valued, utilities. * An instance of ADHZ, with dichotomous utilities and a strongly connected demand graph, which does not admit an equilibrium. Since computing an equilibrium for HZ is likely to be highly intractable and because of the difficulty of extending HZ to more general utility functions, Hosseini and Vazirani proposed (a rich collection of) Nash-bargaining-based matching market models. For the dichotomous-utilities case of their model linear Arrow-Debreu Nash bargaining one-sided matching market (1LAD), we give a combinatorial, strongly polynomial-time algorithm and show that it admits a rational convex program.
We design a prediction market to recover a complete and fully general probability distribution over a random variable. Traders buy and sell interval securities that pay $1 if the outcome falls into an interval and $0 otherwise. Our market takes the form of a central automated market maker and allows traders to express interval endpoints of arbitrary precision. We present two designs in both of which market operations take time logarithmic in the number of intervals (that traders distinguish), providing the first computationally efficient market for a continuous variable. Our first design replicates the popular logarithmic market scoring rule (LMSR), but operates exponentially faster than a standard LMSR by exploiting its modularity properties to construct a balanced binary tree and decompose computations along the tree nodes. The second design consists of two or more parallel LMSR market makers that mediate submarkets of increasingly fine-grained outcome partitions. This design remains computationally efficient for all operations, including arbitrage removal across submarkets. It adds two additional benefits for the market designer: (1) the ability to express utility for information at various resolutions by assigning different liquidity values, and (2) the ability to guarantee a true constant bounded loss by appropriately decreasing the liquidity in each submarket.
We investigate the computation of equilibria in extensive-form games where ex ante correlation is possible, focusing on correlated equilibria requiring the least amount of communication between the players and the mediator. Motivated by the hardness results on the computation of normal-form correlated equilibria, we introduce the notion of normal-form coarse correlated equilibrium, extending the definition of coarse correlated equilibrium to sequential games. We show that, in two-player games without chance moves, an optimal (e.g., social welfare maximizing) normal-form coarse correlated equilibrium can be computed in polynomial time, and that in general multi-player games (including two-player games with Chance), the problem is NP-hard. For the former case, we provide a polynomial-time algorithm based on the ellipsoid method and also propose a more practical one, which can be efficiently applied to problems of considerable size. Then, we discuss how our algorithm can be extended to games with Chance and games with more than two players.
We study the problem of computing Nash equilibria of zero-sum games. Many natural zero-sum games have exponentially many strategies, but highly structured payoffs. For example, in the well-studied Colonel Blotto game (introduced by Borel in 1921), players must divide a pool of troops among a set of battlefields with the goal of winning (i.e., having more troops in) a majority. The Colonel Blotto game is commonly used for analyzing a wide range of applications from the U.S presidential election, to innovative technology competitions, to advertisement, to sports. However, because of the size of the strategy space, standard methods for computing equilibria of zero-sum games fail to be computationally feasible. Indeed, despite its importance, only a few solutions for special variants of the problem are known. In this paper we show how to compute equilibria of Colonel Blotto games. Moreover, our approach takes the form of a general reduction: to find a Nash equilibrium of a zero-sum game, it suffices to design a separation oracle for the strategy polytope of any bilinear game that is payoff-equivalent. We then apply this technique to obtain the first polytime algorithms for a variety of games. In addition to Colonel Blotto, we also show how to compute equilibria in an infinite-strategy variant called the General Lotto game; this involves showing how to prune the strategy space to a finite subset before applying our reduction. We also consider the class of dueling games, first introduced by Immorlica et al. (2011). We show that our approach provably extends the class of dueling games for which equilibria can be computed: we introduce a new dueling game, the matching duel, on which prior methods fail to be computationally feasible but upon which our reduction can be applied.