arXiv preprints from January 1, 2026 through September 21, 2026 — 06:43:03 EST
States and alliances spend enormous resources signaling resolve to deter adversaries. Two canonical strategies are burning money (sunk costs) and burning bridges (audience costs). Large audience costs can deter effectively, but they may be infeasible and, even when feasible, can increase the likelihood of war relative to burning...
This paper studies how Chile's three largest pharmacy chains moved from the price war to collusion, using court-record daily prices and a structural model. After a court-ordered advertisement ban ended the comparison campaign, the estimated gain from loss-leader pricing fell sharply, weakening the incentive to continue the price war....
Two frequent approaches for identifying structural VARs are external instruments, which carry economic content but are often weak, and non-Gaussianity of the shocks which provides statistical identification but carries no economic meaning. We combine the two strategies in a single generalized method of moments framework that stacks...
Complementary resources are often allocated by agencies that see different coordinates of an individual's needs. If an intervention requires complementary resources, an agency may know if said person lacks its own resource; yet not know if supplying completes a useful bundle. We study allocation of $m$ divisible complementary goods...
We introduce a notion and motivation for very credible auctions. This is a strengthening in the commitment in the credible auctions setting, making it more suitable for a modern digital applications.
Observed choice in a dynamic game mixes current profit with continuation value. A rival adds a second problem: the same comparison averages over the rival's equilibrium policy. Changing the primitive transition rewrites continuation technology; changing the rival's Markov policy, holding that law fixed, rewrites the mixture over...
We study strategy-proof social choice where agents have single-dipped preferences and outcomes may be sets of alternatives. While point-valued strategy-proof rules select an endpoint, we ask which outcomes survive when sets are compared through responsive extensions. Under the standard responsive extension, preferences over...
In social and economic networks linked agents often share connections in common. There are two competing explanations for this phenomenon. First, agents may have a structural taste for transitive links - the returns to linking may be higher if two agents share a common connection. Second, agents may assortatively match on unobserved...
This paper provides an explicit characterization of the (unique) equilibrium of the two-bidder all-pay auction with asymmetrically distributed, independent private values. The characterization is achieved through recasting the problem into its equivalence in the quantile space and thereby obtaining equilibrium bid functions that...
This study examines emission interdependencies within the waste sector and between waste and other economic domains, energy, transport, water, and communications, using Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodologies with emphasis on process-based and hybrid approaches. The analysis employs the EXIOBASE multi-regional input-output database....
A switchback experiment alternates an entire system between treatment and control over time. It is especially useful when interactions between units can undermine standard unit-level experiments. Switchback experiments are commonly implemented on fixed temporal grids, which impose highly structured restrictions on when treatment can...
If a probability measure is a mean-preserving contraction of another, the two measures are said to be in convex order. This paper provides a complete characterization of mean-preserving contractions and their extreme points in the multidimensional setting, extending the results of Kleiner, Moldovanu, Strack, and Whitmeyer (2024) to...
Large language models (LLMs) have been widely adopted for clinical question answering (QA). Current systems can attach citations to their answers, but these often point to broad texts, leaving time-pressed clinicians unable to verify them efficiently. An alternative is to ensure that responses are verifiable by construction: providing...
Software agents with Large Language Models (LLMs) are designed for Automated Program Repair (APR) tasks, raising the possibility that, in the near future, APR agents will fix bugs automatically without much human intervention. Can we trust an APR agent to produce both functionally correct and secure code in such situations? What if...
The Max-Host Dragonfly+ topology's original paper proves that there is a 2:1 worst-case oversubscription ratio in expectation for the permutation traffic pattern. We show that the proof only covers a subset of permutation patterns, specifically those in which all host pairs are in different groups, and for any receiver group there are...
Home-care allocation must balance continuity of care, caregiver overtime, and caregiver-service compatibility. The published formulation of the Home-Care Optimal Resource Allocation Problem (HCORAP) uses a weighted policy (Weighted) to combine these outcomes, allowing compatibility gains to offset poorer continuity or additional...
Record-level differential privacy exposes a structural misalignment in personalized federated learning when client-specific variation is low-dimensional while training repeatedly releases high-dimensional updates. In this paper, we address this misalignment by releasing a private client context once and confining repeated adaptation...
Existing Parsons problem tools primarily focus on correctness, indicating whether a student solved a problem, but providing limited visibility into the underlying problem-solving process. We address this gap by introducing Pulla, a Parsons problem tool that instruments programming assignments to capture fine-grained interaction data....
Vision-language-action policies are typically evaluated one perturbation at a time, providing a useful diagnosis of their sensitivity to individual distribution shifts. Real-world deployment, however, may involve several shifts simultaneously, and it remains unclear how these individual robustness measurements compose. We ask whether...
Language-model agents increasingly operate over complete software repositories, yet cybersecurity evaluations primarily measure whether they can detect, reproduce, or repair vulnerabilities rather than whether they can locate the relevant code. We study vulnerability localization: given a weakness class and an unfamiliar repository,...
Scientific agents contribute to hypothesis discovery by synthesizing evidence, assessing proposals, and developing new explanations. Recent systems combine scientific agents with evolutionary search through critique, comparison, and revision. However, how different forms of agent collaboration affect hypothesis quality remains an open...
Recurrent GNNs iterate message passing to convergence, and their logical characterizations to date rely on multi-set aggregation, graded (counting) logics, and halting or acceptance conditions that cannot be verified from the network's parameters. We study recurrent GNNs with set-based aggregation and identify sufficient conditions...
We study participatory budgeting with additive utilities. We introduce a selection rule based on utility-weighted harmonic entropy and a cost penalty, and prove that it returns budget-feasible outcomes satisfying core-up-to-one.
While quantum interactive proof systems using at least three messages can achieve perfect completeness, as shown by Kitaev and Watrous (STOC 2000), whether perfect completeness is achievable for one- and two-message quantum proof systems has remained open. For the one-message case, whether $\sf QMA$ can achieve perfect completeness...
Multiscale Visibility Theory (MVT) is introduced as a task-relative operator-geometric framework for determining how prescribed information survives and remains accessible through a structured observation architecture. Rather than evaluating observation quality by transform magnitude, output energy, rank, or signal prominence alone,...