English (United Kingdom)

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/featured_content/oa?rat=en

https://curated-unify.zendy.io/wp-json/zendy-region/v1/highlighted_journal/

Global: Zendy Plus annual

Presents the access of premium content as premium feature

Premium Content

Presents the keyphrase highlighting as premium feature

Keyphrase Highlighting

Presents the summarisation as premium feature

Summarisation

Insights

Presents the pdf analysis as premium feature

PDF Analysis

Presents the zaia usage as premium feature

ZAIA

Global: Zendy Plus monthly

Global: Zendy Tools annual

Global: Zendy Tools monthly

Global: Zendy Free Plan

In multi-agent environments in which coordination is desirable, the historyof play often causes lock-in at sub-optimal outcomes. Notoriously, technologieswith a significant environmental footprint or high social cost persist despitethe successful development of more environmentally friendly and/or sociallyefficient alternatives. The displacement of the status quo is hindered byentrenched economic interests and network effects. To exacerbate matters, thestandard mechanism design approaches based on centralized authorities with thecapacity to use preferential subsidies to effectively dictate system outcomesare not always applicable to modern decentralized economies. What other typesof mechanisms are feasible? In this paper, we develop and analyze a mechanismthat induces transitions from inefficient lock-ins to superior alternatives.This mechanism does not exogenously favor one option over another -- instead,the phase transition emerges endogenously via a standard evolutionary learningmodel, Q-learning, where agents trade-off exploration and exploitation.Exerting the same transient influence to both the efficient and inefficienttechnologies encourages exploration and results in irreversible phasetransitions and permanent stabilization of the efficient one. On a technicallevel, our work is based on bifurcation and catastrophe theory, a branch ofmathematics that deals with changes in the number and stability properties ofequilibria. Critically, our analysis is shown to be structurally robust tosignificant and even adversarially chosen perturbations to the parameters ofboth our game and our behavioral model.

Catastrophe by Design in Population Games: Destabilizing Wasteful Locked-in Technologies