Games with Payments between Learning Agents

Understand

In repeated games, such as auctions, players rely on autonomous learning agents to choose their actions.

• We study settings in which players have their agents make monetary transfers to other agents during play at their own expense, in order to influence learning dynamics in their favor.
• Our goal is to understand when players have incentives to use such payments, how payments between agents affect learning outcomes, and what the resulting implications are for welfare and its distribution.
• We propose a simple game-theoretic model to capture the incentive structure of such scenarios.