This paper studies covert (or hidden) information acquisition in common value Bayesian games of strategic complementarities. Using the supermodular stochastic order to arrange the structures of information increasingly in terms of preferences, we provide novel, easily interpretable conditions under which the value of information is globally convex, and study the implications in terms of the equ...

While central to the application of probabilistic models to discrete data, the problem of marginal inference is in general intractable and efficient approximation schemes need to exploit the problem structure. Recently, there have been efforts to develop inference techniques that do not necessarily make factorization assumptions about the distribution, but rather exploit the fact that sometimes...

We present the equivalence of the first-order local consistency relaxation and the MAX SAT relaxation of Goemans and Williamson [1] for a class of MRFs we refer to as logical MRFs. This allows us to combine the advantages of both approaches into a single technique: solving the local consistency relaxation with any of a number of message-passing algorithms, and then improving the solution qualit...

We provide a review and synthesis of polyhedral approaches to nonpreemptive machine scheduling problems. The choice of decision variables is the prime determinant of various formulations for such problems. Constraints, such as facet inducing inequalities for corresponding polyhedra, are often needed, in addition to those just required for the validity of the initial formulation, in order to obt...

We prove the equivalence of first-order local consistency relaxations and the MAX SAT relaxation of Goemans and Williamson (1994) for a class of MRFs we refer to as logical MRFs. This allows us to combine the advantages of each into a single MAP inference technique: solving the local consistency relaxation with any of a number of highly scalable message-passing algorithms, and then obtaining a ...

This paper studies equilibrium selection in binary supermodular games based on perfect foresight dynamics. We provide complete characterizations of absorbing and globally accessible equilibria and apply them to two subclasses of games. First, for unanimity games, it is shown that our selection criterion is not in agreement with that in terms of Nash products, and an example is presented in whic...

Firms and statistical agencies that publish aggregate data face practical legal requirements to protect the privacy of individuals. Increasingly, these organizations meet standards by using publication mechanisms which satisfy differential privacy. We consider problem choosing such a mechanism so as maximize value its output end users. show this is equivalent constrained information design prob...

We study a class of stochastic dynamic games that exhibit strategic complementarities between players; formally, in the games we consider, the payoff of a player has increasing differences between her own state and the empirical distribution of the states of other players. Such games can be used to model a diverse set of applications, including network security models, recommender systems, and ...