Local non-Bayesian social learning with stubborn agents

We study a social learning model in which agents iteratively update their beliefs about the true state of the world using private signals and the beliefs of other agents in a non-Bayesian manner. Some agents are stubborn, meaning they attempt to convince others of an erroneous true state (modeling fake news). We show that while agents learn the true state on short timescales, they "forget" it and believe the erroneous state to be true on longer timescales. Using these results, we devise strategies for seeding stubborn agents so as to disrupt learning, which outperform intuitive heuristics and give novel insights regarding vulnerabilities in social learning

Small-Scale Markets for Bilateral Resource Trading in the Sharing Economy

We consider a general small-scale market for agent-to-agent resource sharing, in which each agent could either be a server (seller) or a client (buyer) in each time period. In every time period, a server has a certain amount of resources that any client could consume, and randomly gets matched with a client. Our target is to maximize the resource utilization in such an agent-to-agent market, where the agents are strategic. During each transaction, the server gets money and the client gets resources. Hence, trade ratio maximization implies efficiency maximization of our system. We model the proposed market system through a Mean Field Game approach and prove the existence of the Mean Field Equilibrium, which can achieve an almost 100% trade ratio. Finally, we carry out a simulation study motivated by an agent-to-agent computing market, and a case study on a proposed photovoltaic market, and show the designed market benefits both individuals and the system as a whole

Many-Sources Large Deviations for Max-Weight Scheduling

In this paper, a many-sources large deviations principle (LDP) for the transient workload of a multi-queue single-server system is established where the service rates are chosen from a compact, convex and coordinate-convex rate region and where the service discipline is the max-weight policy. Under the assumption that the arrival processes satisfy a many-sources LDP, this is accomplished by employing Garcia's extended contraction principle that is applicable to quasi-continuous mappings. For the simplex rate-region, an LDP for the stationary workload is also established under the additional requirements that the scheduling policy be work-conserving and that the arrival processes satisfy certain mixing conditions. The LDP results can be used to calculate asymptotic buffer overflow probabilities accounting for the multiplexing gain, when the arrival process is an average of \emph{i.i.d.} processes. The rate function for the stationary workload is expressed in term of the rate functions of the finite-horizon workloads when the arrival processes have \emph{i.i.d.} increments.Comment: 44 page