Breaking Status-Quo Inertia in Living Temporal Games: Dynamic Intervention, Implementation, and Structural Design
Fuente:
arXiv
Saved in:
| Main Authors: | , , , |
|---|---|
| Format: | Preprint |
| Published: |
2026
|
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | |
| Tags: |
Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
|
| _version_ | 1866911696617996288 |
|---|---|
| author | Gordji, Madjid Eshaghi Jabbari, Ali Berahman, Mohammad Ali Abounoori, Esmaiel |
| author_facet | Gordji, Madjid Eshaghi Jabbari, Ali Berahman, Mohammad Ali Abounoori, Esmaiel |
| contents | Westudy how a planner can design dynamic interventions to overcome status-quo inertia in living temporal games, where strategic agents control their state (active, sleep, partially dead) on a temporal network. Building on the continuous-time stochastic game framework of our companion paper, we introduce three intervention classes: bounded transfers (price based), structural modifications (edge deletion, addition, or replacement), and information signals. We formalize the notion of inertia depth and prove a threshold theorem: the status quo equilibrium survives all transfer perturbations whose magnitude is below a critical bound that depends on the remaining horizon. A central structural dominance result shows that for any finite transfer budget there exists a family of games where no bounded price intervention can eliminate the inefficient equilibrium, yet a single edge replacement (continuous-flow to discrete-transport) succeeds. We then study private-information subclasses with static types. Using a uniformization reduction, we prove an impossibility result: no direct mechanism can simultaneously satisfy ex post incentive compatibility, ex post budget balance, and history privacy while always implementing an efficient equilibrium. In the same subclass we construct a dynamic pivot mechanism that achieves second-best efficiency with bounded deficit. Finally, we show that replacing continuous-flow edges by discrete-transport edges weakly expands the set of implementable outcomes, highlighting the importance of temporal semantics for mechanism design. Our results extend the static analysis of [5] to continuous time strategic networks and provide a rigorous foundation for subsequent papers on learning and mean-field design. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_19087 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Breaking Status-Quo Inertia in Living Temporal Games: Dynamic Intervention, Implementation, and Structural Design Gordji, Madjid Eshaghi Jabbari, Ali Berahman, Mohammad Ali Abounoori, Esmaiel Theoretical Economics Westudy how a planner can design dynamic interventions to overcome status-quo inertia in living temporal games, where strategic agents control their state (active, sleep, partially dead) on a temporal network. Building on the continuous-time stochastic game framework of our companion paper, we introduce three intervention classes: bounded transfers (price based), structural modifications (edge deletion, addition, or replacement), and information signals. We formalize the notion of inertia depth and prove a threshold theorem: the status quo equilibrium survives all transfer perturbations whose magnitude is below a critical bound that depends on the remaining horizon. A central structural dominance result shows that for any finite transfer budget there exists a family of games where no bounded price intervention can eliminate the inefficient equilibrium, yet a single edge replacement (continuous-flow to discrete-transport) succeeds. We then study private-information subclasses with static types. Using a uniformization reduction, we prove an impossibility result: no direct mechanism can simultaneously satisfy ex post incentive compatibility, ex post budget balance, and history privacy while always implementing an efficient equilibrium. In the same subclass we construct a dynamic pivot mechanism that achieves second-best efficiency with bounded deficit. Finally, we show that replacing continuous-flow edges by discrete-transport edges weakly expands the set of implementable outcomes, highlighting the importance of temporal semantics for mechanism design. Our results extend the static analysis of [5] to continuous time strategic networks and provide a rigorous foundation for subsequent papers on learning and mean-field design. |
| title | Breaking Status-Quo Inertia in Living Temporal Games: Dynamic Intervention, Implementation, and Structural Design |
| topic | Theoretical Economics |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.19087 |