Related papers: Time Consistent Discounting
I model a rational agent who experiences endogenous deadline pressure in the face of a fixed future deadline. The agent holds a resource stock, and opportunities to spend resources arise randomly according to a Poisson process. When the…
I consider motivation and value-alignment in AI systems from the perspective of (constrained) entropy maximization. Though the structures encoding knowledge in any physical system can be understood as energetic constraints, only living…
In this technical note, we establish an upper-bound on the threshold on the discount factor starting from which all discounted-optimal deterministic policies are gain-optimal, that we prove to be tight on an example. To address…
We consider a repeated auction where the buyer's utility for an item depends on the time that elapsed since his last purchase. We present an algorithm to build the optimal bidding policy, and then, because optimal might be impractical, we…
When an Agent visits a platform recommending a menu of content to select from, their choice of item depends not only on fixed preferences, but also on their prior engagements with the platform. The Recommender's primary objective is…
We consider a novel setting where a set of items are matched to the same set of agents repeatedly over multiple rounds. Each agent gets exactly one item per round, which brings interesting challenges to finding efficient and/or fair {\em…
A firm that sells a non perishable product considers intertemporal price discrimination in the objective of maximizing its long-run average revenue. We consider a general model of patient customers with changing valuations. Arriving…
The value function plays a crucial role as a measure for the cumulative future reward an agent receives in both reinforcement learning and optimal control. It is therefore of interest to study how similar the values of neighboring states…
We study identification of dynamic discrete choice models with hyperbolic discounting. We show that the standard discount factor, present bias factor, and instantaneous utility functions for the sophisticated agent are point-identified from…
Environments with fixed adjustment costs such as transaction costs or \lq menu costs\rq$ $ are widespread within economic systems. The presence of fixed minimal adjustment costs produces adjustment stickiness so that agents must choose a…
We consider a dynamic pricing problem for repeated contextual second-price auctions with multiple strategic buyers who aim to maximize their long-term time discounted utility. The seller has limited information on buyers' overall demand…
In recent years, there is growing need and interest in formalizing and reasoning about the quality of software and hardware systems. As opposed to traditional verification, where one handles the question of whether a system satisfies, or…
We investigate the power of randomness in the context of a fundamental Bayesian optimal mechanism design problem--a single seller aims to maximize expected revenue by allocating multiple kinds of resources to "unit-demand" agents with…
In this paper, we solve the time inconsistent portfolio selection problem by using different utility functions with a moving target as our constraint. We solve this problem by finding an equilibrium control under the given definition as our…
In the last decades, control problems with infinite horizons and discount factors have become increasingly central not only for economics but also for applications in artificial intelligence and machine learning. The strong links between…
We study a mechanism-design problem in which spiteful agents strive to not only maximize their rewards but also, contingent upon their own payoff levels, seek to lower the opponents' rewards. We characterize all individually rational (IR)…
We consider the design of experiments to evaluate treatments that are administered by self-interested agents, each seeking to achieve the highest evaluation and win the experiment. For example, in an advertising experiment, a company wishes…
We present a linear agent based model on brand competition. Each agent belongs to one of the two brands and interacts with its nearest neighbors. In the process the agent can decide to change to the other brand if the move is beneficial.…
We propose a model of multiagent systems whose agents have a tendency to balance their decisions in time. We find phase transitions to oscillatory behavior, explainable by the aggregation of agents into two groups. On a longer time scale,…
The consumption function maps current wealth and the exogenous state to current consumption. We prove the existence and uniqueness of a consumption function when the agent has a preference for wealth. When the period utility functions are…