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Price of Anarchy for Mechanisms with Risk-Averse Agents Kesselheim, Thomas Kodric, Bojana Mechanism Design Price of Anarchy Risk Aversion Smoothness We study the price of anarchy of mechanisms in the presence of risk-averse agents. Previous work has focused on agents with quasilinear utilities, possibly with a budget. Our model subsumes this as a special case but also captures that agents might be less sensitive to payments than in the risk-neutral model. We show that many positive price-of-anarchy results proved in the smoothness framework continue to hold in the more general risk-averse setting. A sufficient condition is that agents can never end up with negative quasilinear utility after playing an undominated strategy. This is true, e.g., for first-price and second-price auctions. For all-pay auctions, similar results do not hold: We show that there are Bayes-Nash equilibria with arbitrarily bad social welfare compared to the optimum. Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik Thomas Kesselheim and Bojana Kodric 2018 Is Part Of LIPIcs, Volume 107, 45th International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming (ICALP 2018) InProceedings Text doc-type:ResearchArticle publishedVersion application/pdf doi:10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2018.155 urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-91599 https://drops.dagstuhl.de/entities/document/10.4230/LIPIcs.ICALP.2018.155 eng https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode