Information Design for Strategic Coordination of Autonomous Devices with Non-Aligned Utilities

In this paper, we investigate the coordination of autonomous devices with non-aligned utility functions. Both encoder and decoder are considered as players, that choose the encoding and the decoding in order to maximize their long-run utility functions. The topology of the point-to-point network under investigation, suggests that the decoder implements a strategy, knowing in advance the strategy of the encoder. We characterize the encoding and decoding functions that form an equilibrium, by using empirical coordination. The equilibrium solution is related to an auxiliary game in which both players choose some conditional distributions in order to maximize their expected utilities. This problem is closely related to the literature on "Information Design" in Game Theory. We also characterize the set of posterior distributions that are compatible with a rate-limited channel between the encoder and the decoder. Finally, we provide an example of non-aligned utility functions corresponding to parallel fading multiple access channels.Comment: IEEE Proc. of the Fifty-fourth Annual Allerton Conference Allerton House, UIUC, Illinois, USA September 27 - 30, 201

Do subsidized work contracts enhance capabilities of the long-term unemployed ? Evidence based on French Data

In the 1990’s, France introduced different subsidised contracts to create jobs targeted at long-term unemployment. These programs were supposed to help the beneficiaries to enhance their employability. It is then interesting to use the “capabilities” approach to assess their impact. From the panel of the Research and Statistical Department of the French Ministry of labour and social affairs (Dares) concerning employment policy beneficiaries, an initial analysis explored the beneficiaries’ refined functionings and a second how they subjectively perceive their standard of living. Comparing beneficiaries’ perceptions to those of a control group provided the necessary data to evaluate the real impact of these employment schemes on beneficiaries. Globally, subsidised employment contracts provide beneficiaries’ with an increased number of opportunities or choices that can be achieved and thus can be said to improve their quality of life. Furthermore, the private sector employment contract to the long-term unemployed (the so-called “CIE”) is generally viewed more positively than the fixed-term contract in the public sector (the so-called “CES”) although the latter is viewed as more successful in allowing beneficiaries to “feel useful” and “regain self-esteem”.

Do Ideas Matter in Strategic Choices Made by Organizations? An Empirical Work on the Participation of Agricultural Organizations to the Political Making Process in Costa Rica

The new institutional economics has recently developed the idea that the institutional environment can have an impact on economic actors' mental perceptions, and reciprocally, that these perceptions can impact on the institutional environment. This latter point seems particularly relevant in the field of economic organisations participation in the political making process. Nevertheless the empirical description of this role of mental perceptions in the political behaviour had not been made clearly. To contribute to this empirical description we lead a comparative study of 4 farm sectors in Costa Rica, based on a dynamic approach of mental perceptions in relation with the institutional change occurring during the liberalisation process. We carry out a statistical analysis of mental perceptions through a textual analysis of actors perceptions of the institutional change, leading to two main conclusions. Firstly we provide an empirical confirmation that mental models are influenced by specific institutional environments and lead to different strategies regarding the participation to the political making process. Secondly, we show that when an exogenous change occurs in the institutional environment, the mental models existing before the change can persist and lead to inefficient behaviours. This can partly explain part of the difficulties some sectors to lead efficient political activity that ensures their survival in a liberalized environment.Political Economy, D7, N5, Z0,

Iterated Regret Minimization in Game Graphs

Iterated regret minimization has been introduced recently by J.Y. Halpern and R. Pass in classical strategic games. For many games of interest, this new solution concept provides solutions that are judged more reasonable than solutions offered by traditional game concepts -- such as Nash equilibrium --. Although computing iterated regret on explicit matrix game is conceptually and computationally easy, nothing is known about computing the iterated regret on games whose matrices are defined implicitly using game tree, game DAG or, more generally game graphs. In this paper, we investigate iterated regret minimization for infinite duration two-player quantitative non-zero sum games played on graphs. We consider reachability objectives that are not necessarily antagonist. Edges are weighted by integers -- one for each player --, and the payoffs are defined by the sum of the weights along the paths. Depending on the class of graphs, we give either polynomial or pseudo-polynomial time algorithms to compute a strategy that minimizes the regret for a fixed player. We finally give algorithms to compute the strategies of the two players that minimize the iterated regret for trees, and for graphs with strictly positive weights only.Comment: 19 pages. Bug in introductive example fixed

Safety Verification of Communicating One-Counter Machines

In order to verify protocols that tag messages with integer values, we investigate the decidability of the reachability problem for systems of communicating one-counter machines. These systems consist of local one-counter machines that asynchronously communicate by exchanging the value of their counters via, a priori unbounded, FIFO channels. This model extends communicating finite-state machines (CFSM) by infinite-state local processes and an infinite message alphabet. The main result of the paper is a complete characterization of the communication topologies that have a solvable reachability question. As already CFSM exclude the possibility of automatic verification in presence of mutual communication, we also consider an under-approximative approach to the reachability problem, based on rendezvous synchronization

Tree Regular Model Checking for Lattice-Based Automata

Tree Regular Model Checking (TRMC) is the name of a family of techniques for analyzing infinite-state systems in which states are represented by terms, and sets of states by Tree Automata (TA). The central problem in TRMC is to decide whether a set of bad states is reachable. The problem of computing a TA representing (an over- approximation of) the set of reachable states is undecidable, but efficient solutions based on completion or iteration of tree transducers exist. Unfortunately, the TRMC framework is unable to efficiently capture both the complex structure of a system and of some of its features. As an example, for JAVA programs, the structure of a term is mainly exploited to capture the structure of a state of the system. On the counter part, integers of the java programs have to be encoded with Peano numbers, which means that any algebraic operation is potentially represented by thousands of applications of rewriting rules. In this paper, we propose Lattice Tree Automata (LTAs), an extended version of tree automata whose leaves are equipped with lattices. LTAs allow us to represent possibly infinite sets of interpreted terms. Such terms are capable to represent complex domains and related operations in an efficient manner. We also extend classical Boolean operations to LTAs. Finally, as a major contribution, we introduce a new completion-based algorithm for computing the possibly infinite set of reachable interpreted terms in a finite amount of time.Comment: Technical repor

Non-crossing Brownian paths and Dyson Brownian motion under a moving boundary

We compute analytically the probability $S(t)$ that a set of $N$ Brownian paths do not cross each other and stay below a moving boundary $g(\tau)= W \sqrt{\tau}$ up to time $t$. We show that for large $t$ it decays as a power law $S(t) \sim t^{- \beta(N,W)}$. The decay exponent $\beta(N,W)$ is obtained as the ground state energy of a quantum system of $N$ non-interacting fermions in a harmonic well in the presence of an infinite hard wall at position $W$. Explicit expressions for $\beta(N,W)$ are obtained in various limits of $N$ and $W$, in particular for large $N$ and large $W$. We obtain the joint distribution of the positions of the walkers in the presence of the moving barrier $g(\tau) =W \sqrt{\tau}$ at large time. We extend our results to the case of $N$ Dyson Brownian motions (corresponding to the Gaussian Unitary Ensemble) in the presence of the same moving boundary $g(\tau)=W\sqrt{\tau}$. For $W=0$ we show that the system provides a realization of a Laguerre biorthogonal ensemble in random matrix theory. We obtain explicitly the average density near the barrier, as well as in the bulk far away from the barrier. Finally we apply our results to $N$ non-crossing Brownian bridges on the interval $[0,T]$ under a time-dependent barrier $g_B(\tau)= W \sqrt{\tau(1- \frac{\tau}{T})}$.Comment: 44 pages, 13 figure