Abstract We study collusion between a public firm and private facing linear demand quadratic costs. characterize the collusive outcome that results from Nash bargaining compare it to non-cooperative outcome. If firm’s taste for consumer surplus is mild, both firms reduce output (as in duopoly). intermediate, while reduces output, expands such an extent total increases. strong, expansion does no...

Research on security games has focused on settings where the defender must protect against either a single adversary or multiple, independent adversaries. However, there are a variety of real-world security domains where adversaries may benefit from colluding in their actions against the defender, e.g., wildlife poaching, urban crime and drug trafficking. Given such adversary collusion may be m...

The paper studies bidder behavior in simultaneous, continuous, ascending price auctions. The purpose is to create (possibly extreme) conditions under which tacit collusion develops quickly, naturally and reliably; study models of its development, and then study institutional and environmental remedies that would cause it to evolve into competitive behavior. Special environments were implemented...

Abstract Collusion is a specific and potentially harmful transference-countertransference interaction. At its core an unconscious, unresolved issue shared by two or more participants, who are interlocked in defensive maneuver. The at stake, which avoided the intrapsychic level, externalized, circulating interpersonal space, may pertain to control, intimacy, loss, domination, among other possibi...

We present an important, general class of new games, called side-choosing games (SCGs), for “gamifying” problem solving in formal sciences using plausibility checking. Applications of SCGs include (1) peer-grading in teaching to (2) studying the evolution of knowledge in formal science communities to (3) organizing algorithm competitions. We view SCGs as a new and general model for formulating ...

Malware collusion is a new threat against Android application security. It refers to the scenario where two or more applications interact with each other to perform malicious tasks. Most existing solutions assume the attack model of a standalone malicious application, and thus cannot detect collusion. The objective of this position paper is to point out the need for practical solutions for dete...

Steganography, the hiding of covert messages inside innocuous communication, is an active area of cryptographic research. Recent research has shown that provably undetectable steganography is possible in a wide variety of settings. We believe that the existence of such undetectable steganography will have far reaching implications. In this thesis, we investigate the impact of steganography on t...

We study the problem of collusion in private value auctions by cartels whose members cannot exchange monetary transfers among themselves (i.e. weak cartels). We restrict attention to a large class of auctions that includes standard auctions, which we call winner-payable auctions. Restricting attention to winner payable auctions, we provide a complete characterization of collusion-proof auction ...