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Reinforcement learners are agents that learn to pick actions that lead to high reward. Ideally, the value of a reinforcement learner's policy approaches optimality--where the optimal informed policy is the one which maximizes reward.…
A rich class of mechanism design problems can be understood as incomplete-information games between a principal who commits to a policy and an agent who responds, with payoffs determined by an unknown state of the world. Traditionally,…
In human societies, people's willingness to compete and strive for better social status as well as being envious of those perceived in some way superior lead to social structures that are intrinsically hierarchical. Here we propose an…
This paper proposes self-organization as a method to improve the efficiency and adaptability of bureaucracies and similar social systems. Bureaucracies are described as networks of agents, where the main design principle is to reduce local…
Motivating careerists is challenging for political organizations. Without explicit contracts, careerists often pander to public opinions or their superiors' preferences. Worse, when tasked with implementing these distorted decisions, they…
We study the design of optimal incentives in sequential processes. To do so, we consider a basic and fundamental model in which an agent initiates a value-creating sequential process through costly investment with random success. If…
What are the chances of an ethical individual rising through the ranks of a political party or a corporation in the presence of unethical peers? To answer this question, I consider a four-player two-stage elimination tournament, in which…
Self-organization is a process where order of a whole system arises out of local interactions between small components of a system. Emergy, spelled with an 'm', defined as the amount of (solar) energy used to make a product or service, is…
To make good decisions in the real world people need efficient planning strategies because their computational resources are limited. Knowing which planning strategies would work best for people in different situations would be very useful…
Strategic classification studies the problem where self-interested individuals or agents manipulate their response to obtain favorable decision outcomes made by classifiers, typically turning to dishonest actions when they are less costly…
The efficiency of a large hierarchical organisation is simulated on Barabasi-Albert networks, when each needed link leads to a loss of information. The optimum is found at a finite network size, corresponding to about five hierarchical…
The hypothesis that living systems can benefit from operating at the vicinity of critical points has gained momentum in recent years. Criticality may confer an optimal balance between exceedingly ordered and too noisy states. We here…
How do people decide how long to continue in a task, when to switch, and to which other task? Understanding the mechanisms that underpin task interleaving is a long-standing goal in the cognitive sciences. Prior work suggests greedy…
Generative models are trained with the simple objective of imitating the conditional probability distribution induced by the data they are trained on. Therefore, when trained on data generated by humans, we may not expect the artificial…
In this paper, the total payoff of each agent is regulated to reduce the heterogeneity of the distribution of the total payoffs. It is found there is an optimal regulation strength where the fraction of cooperation is prominently promoted,…
We propose and design recommendation systems that incentivize efficient exploration. Agents arrive sequentially, choose actions and receive rewards, drawn from fixed but unknown action-specific distributions. The recommendation system…
Cooperative behavior in real social dilemmas is often perceived as a phenomenon emerging from norms and punishment. To overcome this paradigm, we highlight the interplay between the influence of social networks on individuals, and the…
Emergence in machine learning refers to the spontaneous appearance of complex behaviors or capabilities that arise from the scale and structure of training data and model architectures, despite not being explicitly programmed. We introduce…
Problem solving (e.g., drug design, traffic engineering, software development) by task forces represents a substantial portion of the economy of developed countries. Here we use an agent-based model of cooperative problem solving systems to…
Social norms serve as an important mechanism to regulate the behaviors of agents and to facilitate coordination among them in multiagent systems. One important research question is how a norm can rapidly emerge through repeated local…