To Spend or to Gain: Online Learning in Repeated Karma Auctions

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Berriaud, Damien, Elokda, Ezzat, Jalota, Devansh, Frazzoli, Emilio, Pavone, Marco, Dörfler, Florian
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Berriaud, Damien
Elokda, Ezzat
Jalota, Devansh
Frazzoli, Emilio
Pavone, Marco
Dörfler, Florian
author_facet Berriaud, Damien
Elokda, Ezzat
Jalota, Devansh
Frazzoli, Emilio
Pavone, Marco
Dörfler, Florian
contents Recent years have seen a surge of artificial currency-based mechanisms in contexts where monetary instruments are deemed unfair or inappropriate, e.g., in allocating food donations to food banks, course seats to students, and, more recently, even for traffic congestion management. Yet the applicability of these mechanisms remains limited in repeated auction settings, as it is challenging for users to learn how to bid an artificial currency that has no value outside the auctions. Indeed, users must jointly learn the value of the currency in addition to how to spend it optimally. Moreover, in the prominent class of karma mechanisms, in which artificial karma payments are redistributed to users at each time step, users do not only spend karma to obtain public resources but also gain karma for yielding them. For this novel class of karma auctions, we propose an adaptive karma pacing strategy that learns to bid optimally, and show that this strategy a) is asymptotically optimal for a single user bidding against competing bids drawn from a stationary distribution; b) leads to convergent learning dynamics when all users adopt it; and c) constitutes an approximate Nash equilibrium as the number of users grows. Our results require a novel analysis in comparison to adaptive pacing strategies in monetary auctions, since we depart from the classical assumption that the currency has known value outside the auctions, and consider that the currency is both spent and gained through the redistribution of payments.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2403_04057
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle To Spend or to Gain: Online Learning in Repeated Karma Auctions
Berriaud, Damien
Elokda, Ezzat
Jalota, Devansh
Frazzoli, Emilio
Pavone, Marco
Dörfler, Florian
Computer Science and Game Theory
Theoretical Economics
Recent years have seen a surge of artificial currency-based mechanisms in contexts where monetary instruments are deemed unfair or inappropriate, e.g., in allocating food donations to food banks, course seats to students, and, more recently, even for traffic congestion management. Yet the applicability of these mechanisms remains limited in repeated auction settings, as it is challenging for users to learn how to bid an artificial currency that has no value outside the auctions. Indeed, users must jointly learn the value of the currency in addition to how to spend it optimally. Moreover, in the prominent class of karma mechanisms, in which artificial karma payments are redistributed to users at each time step, users do not only spend karma to obtain public resources but also gain karma for yielding them. For this novel class of karma auctions, we propose an adaptive karma pacing strategy that learns to bid optimally, and show that this strategy a) is asymptotically optimal for a single user bidding against competing bids drawn from a stationary distribution; b) leads to convergent learning dynamics when all users adopt it; and c) constitutes an approximate Nash equilibrium as the number of users grows. Our results require a novel analysis in comparison to adaptive pacing strategies in monetary auctions, since we depart from the classical assumption that the currency has known value outside the auctions, and consider that the currency is both spent and gained through the redistribution of payments.
title To Spend or to Gain: Online Learning in Repeated Karma Auctions
topic Computer Science and Game Theory
Theoretical Economics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.04057