Interpassivity and the joy of delegated play in idle games

This paper examines the youngest video games genre, the so called idle (incremental) game, also referred to as the passive, self-playing or clicker game, which seems to challenge the current understanding of digital games as systems, based on a human-machine interaction where it is the human who actively engages with the system through meaningful choices. Idle games, on the other hand, tend to play themselves, making the player’s participation optional or, in some cases, entirely redundant. Interactivity and agency – qualities extensively theorised with reference to digital games – are questioned in the context of idling. In this paper the author will investigate the self-contradictory genre through the lens of interpassivity, a concept developed by Robert Pfaller and Slavoj Žižek to describe the aesthetics of delegated enjoyment. This contribution aims at introducing interpassivity to a wider Game Studies community, and offers an alternative perspective to reflect upon digital games in general and self-playing games in particular

The strategy structure of some coalition formation games

In coalitional games with side payments, the core predicts which coalitions form and how benefits are shared. The predictions however run into difficulties if the core is empty or if some coalitions benefit from not blocking truthfully. These difficulties are analyzed in games in which an a priori given collection of coalitions can form, as the collection of pairs of buyer-seller in an assignment game. The incentive properties of the core and of its selections are investigated in function of the collection. Furthermore the relationships with Vickrey-Clarke-Groves mechanisms are drawn.coalition formation ; assignment ; manipulability ; substitutes ; incremental value ; Vickrey-Clarke-Groves mechanism

Generalized Incremental Mechanisms for Scheduling Games

We study the problem of devising truthful mechanisms for cooperative cost sharing games that realize (approximate) budget balance and social cost. Recent negative results show that group-strategyproof mechanisms can only achieve very poor approximation guarantees for several fundamental cost sharing games. Driven by these limitations, we consider cost sharing mechanisms that realize the weaker notion of weak groupstrategyproofness. Mehta et al. [Games and Economic Behavior, 67:125–155, 2009] recently introduced the broad class of weakly group-strategyproof acyclic mechanisms and show that several primal-dual approximation algorithms naturally give rise to such mechanisms with attractive approximation guarantees. In this paper, we provide a simple yet powerful approach that enables us to turn any r-approximation algorithm into a r-budget balanced acyclic mechanism. We demonstrate the applicability of our approach by deriving weakly group-strategyproof mechanisms for several fundamental scheduling problems that outperform the best possible approximation guarantees of Moulin mechanisms. The mechanisms that we develop for completion time scheduling problems are the first mechanisms that achieve constant budget balance and social cost approximation factors. Interestingly, our mechanisms belong to the class of generalized incremental mechanisms proposed by Moulin [Social Choice and Welfare, 16:279–320, 1999]

Value Relevance of Financial and Non-Financial Information: Evidence from the Gaming Industry

Using financial and non-financial data from casino gaming firms listed in the United States from 1999–2017, we explore two research questions: (1) Is financial information value relevant to financial markets in the casino gaming industry? (2) Does non-financial information have incremental explanatory power over financial information? In general, we find that accounting numbers can explain a firm’s market value and stock returns in the casino gaming industry, except for accounting accruals, which may behave differently compared to other industries. We also find that non-financial information, such as the number of table games, number of slot machines, and their relative proportion, have significant value relevance in explaining market valuation. Our findings contribute to a better understanding of the value relevance of financial and non-financial information in the casino gaming industry. We also provide analysis of firms characterized by these non-financial attributes. Keywords: hospitality, casino, gaming, value relevance, table games, slot machines JEL Code: L83, M19, M4

Innovation and the Emergence of Market Dominance

This paper analyzes a model of oligopolistic competition with ongoing investment. It incorporates the following models as special cases: incremental investment, patent races, learning-by-doing, and network externalities. We investigate circumstances under which a firm with low costs or high quality will extend its initial lead through further cost-reducing or quality-improving investments. In many commonly-studied oligopoly games, such investments are strategic substitutes. We derive a new comparative statics result that applies to games with strategic substitutes, and we use the result to derive conditions under which leading firms invest more than lagging firms. We show that the conditions are satisfied in a variety of commonly-studied oligopoly models. We also highlight plausible countervailing effects from two distinct sources. First, leading firms may find it more costly than others to achieve the same increment to their state. This force is particularly salient inmany models of patentn races, where firms make research investments in an attempt to find a new technology that delivers a given level of cost or quality. Second, countervailing effects may arise in dynamic games with more than two firms are sufficiently patient.oligopoly games, strategic substitutes, innovation, investment, increasing dominance, market concentration

PREDICTING CROSS-GAMING PROPENSITY USING E-CHAID ANALYSIS

Cross-selling different types of games could provide an opportunity for casino operators to generate additional time and money spent on gaming from existing patrons. One way to identify the patrons who are likely to cross-play is mining individual players’ gaming data using predictive analytics. Hence, this study aims to predict casino patrons’ propensity to play both slots and table games, also known as cross-gaming, by applying a data-mining algorithm to patrons’ gaming data. The Exhaustive Chi-squared Automatic Interaction Detector (E-CHAID) method was employed to predict cross-gaming propensity. The E-CHAID models based on the gaming-related behavioral data produced actionable model accuracy rates for classifying cross-gamers and non-cross gamers along with the cross-gaming propensity scores for each patron. Using these scores, casino managers can accurately identify likely cross-gamers and develop a more targeted approach to market to them. Furthermore, the results of this study would enable casino managers to estimate incremental gaming revenues through cross-gaming. This, in turn, will assist them in spending marketing dollars more efficiently while maximizing gaming revenues

Data Structures for Deviation Payoffs

We present new data structures for representing symmetric normal-form games. These data structures are optimized for efficiently computing the expected utility of each unilateral pure-strategy deviation from a symmetric mixed-strategy profile. The cumulative effect of numerous incremental innovations is a dramatic speedup in the computation of symmetric mixed-strategy Nash equilibria, making it practical to represent and solve games with dozens to hundreds of players. These data structures naturally extend to role-symmetric and action-graph games with similar benefits.Comment: AAMAS 2023 + appendice

Limited Incremental Linking and Unlinked Trade Agreements

The broadened scope of the GATT/WTO through successive rounds of trade liberalization is explained as a result of trade-partner specificity, linked agreements, and cross retaliation. In more recent years, however, countries have pursued trade liberalization through sector specific zero-for-zero agreements and preferential trade agreements, both of which have a reduced chance of suffering cross retaliation. This increase in unlinked agreements is explained by imperfect observability of trade policies generating gratuitous trade disputes and unjustified cross retaliation. If the dispute generating noise is perfectly correlated across sectors, however, then it provides no reason not to link agreements in a static sense and in many cases incremental linking still produces more liberalization than static linking. It is only when the noise is imperfectly correlated that linking and cross retaliation are problematic so that some sectors can enforce more liberalization in an unlinked agreement. If the correlation drops, the noise increases, or the number of sectors already covered is large, then incremental linking of more sectors is inefficient and countries pursue unlinked agreements.Trade Disputes, WTO, Dispute Settlement, Dynamic Games.