This dissertation presents research on the game theory of political power, both between and within nations. It first revisits a classical distinction between three different types of power or influence: information, rewards and threats. By presenting a binary-action Principal-Agent problem which incorporates the essential ingredients of all three types of...
Contest theory is an area of game theory that studies environments in which agents make sunk investments in order to get a prize. These investments could be money, effort, time, etc. Contest theory is used to study a wide range of applications, like political contests, research and development, advertisement campaigns,...
This dissertation endogenizes information acquisition in two-player games across three different settings. The first chapter explores when moral hazard in a principal-agent contract can lead to pareto improvements when it is preceeded by information gathering. The second chapter studies how product differentiation affects the amount of market research done by...
Agents of online platforms often have to make purchase decisions in the face the uncertainty of the true value of an item. Observing the other agents’ actions and/or reviews is one common method to learn about an item. However such observational learning can lead to an information cascade, in which...
The traveling salesman problem (TSP) is a widely studied combinatorial optimization problem, which, given a set of cities and a cost to travel from one city to another, seeks to identify the tour that will allow a salesman to visit each city only once, starting and ending in the same...
The objective of game theory is to analyze the relationship
between decision-making situations in order to achieve a
desirable outcome. The theory can be applied to a wide range
of applications, including, but not limited to, economics,
politics and even the biological sciences. In essence, game
theory serves as means...
Optimization and Game Theory have certain conceptual overlaps. It is even said that John von Neumann
conjectured the Duality Theorem using information from his game theory. This article discusses two optimization
applications to the game theory: a methodology for solving the Nash Equilibrium and a decentralized model in
supply chain...