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A principal who values an object allocates it to one or more agents. Agents learn private information (signals) from an information designer about the allocation payoff to the principal. Monetary transfer is not available but the principal…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2022-10-31 Yi-Chun Chen , Gaoji Hu , Xiangqian Yang

We study how a principal should optimally choose between implementing a new policy and maintaining the status quo when information relevant for the decision is privately held by agents. Agents are strategic in revealing their information;…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2020-02-21 Albin Erlanson , Andreas Kleiner

We consider the principal-agent problem with heterogeneous agents. Previous works assume that the principal signs independent incentive contracts with every agent to make them invest more efforts on the tasks. However, in many…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2019-11-12 Shenke Xiao , Zihe Wang , Mengjing Chen , Pingzhong Tang , Xiwang Yang

Contract scheduling is a widely studied framework for designing real-time systems with interruptible capabilities. Previous work has showed that a prediction on the interruption time can help improve the performance of contract-based…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2024-04-22 Spyros Angelopoulos , Marcin Bienkowski , Christoph Dürr , Bertrand Simon

One purpose -- quite a few thinkers would say the main purpose -- of seeking knowledge about the world is to enhance our ability to make good decisions. An item of knowledge that can make no conceivable difference with regard to anything we…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-04-12 Henry E. Kyburg

We analyze a model of selling a single object to a principal-agent pair who want to acquire the object for a firm. The principal and the agent have different assessments of the object's value to the firm. The agent is budget-constrained…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2024-10-07 Debasis Mishra , Kolagani Paramahamsa

In an online contract selection problem there is a seller which offers a set of contracts to sequentially arriving buyers whose types are drawn from an unknown distribution. If there exists a profitable contract for the buyer in the offered…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2013-05-16 Cem Tekin , Mingyan Liu

We consider the problem of a principal who needs to elicit the true worth of an object she owns from an agent who has a unique ability to compute this information. The correctness of the information cannot be verified by the principal, so…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2020-09-15 Shani Alkobi , David Sarne , Erel Segal-Halevi , Tomer Sharbaf

Contract theory studies how a principal can incentivize agents to exert costly, unobservable effort through performance-based payments. While classical economic models provide elegant characterizations of optimal solutions, modern…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Michal Feldman

Although both data availability and the demand for accurate forecasts are increasing, collaboration between stakeholders is often constrained by data ownership and competitive interests. In contrast to recent proposals within cooperative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Michael Vitali , Pierre Pinson

When introducing a novel product, a seller sets a price and decides how much information to provide to a buyer, who may incur a search cost to discover an outside option. The buyer knows the outside option distribution; the seller knows…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-08-07 Kun Zhang

When learning is used to inform decisions about humans, such as for loans, hiring, or admissions, this can incentivize users to strategically modify their features, at a cost, to obtain positive predictions. The common assumption is that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-15 Yonatan Sommer , Ivri Hikri , Lotan Amit , Nir Rosenfeld

The classic *priced query model*, introduced by Charikar et al. (STOC 2000), captures the task of computing a known function on an unknown input when each input variable can only be revealed by paying an associated cost. The goal is to…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Shivam Nadimpalli , Mingda Qiao , Ronitt Rubinfeld

Incorporation of expert information in inference or decision settings is often important, especially in cases where data are unavailable, costly or unreliable. One approach is to elicit prior quantiles from an expert and then to fit these…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2016-11-04 Nicholas M. Kiefer

We study a robust contract design problem with deferred inspection, in which a principal allocates a scarce resource to an agent, observes the agent's realized outcome ex post at negligible cost, and conditions transfers on this information…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-01-12 Halil I. Bayrak , Martin Bichler

A principal must decide between two options. Which one she prefers depends on the private information of two agents. One agent always prefers the first option; the other always prefers the second. Transfers are infeasible. One application…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2022-05-24 Deniz Kattwinkel , Axel Niemeyer , Justus Preusser , Alexander Winter

In this work, we study the experts problem in the distributed setting where an expert's cost needs to be aggregated across multiple servers. Our study considers various communication models such as the message-passing model and the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-07 Zhihao Jia , Qi Pang , Trung Tran , David Woodruff , Zhihao Zhang , Wenting Zheng

The agency problem emerges in today's large scale machine learning tasks, where the learners are unable to direct content creation or enforce data collection. In this work, we propose a theoretical framework for aligning economic interests…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-03 Jibang Wu , Siyu Chen , Mengdi Wang , Huazheng Wang , Haifeng Xu

Algorithms with predictions is a recent framework for decision-making under uncertainty that leverages the power of machine-learned predictions without making any assumption about their quality. The goal in this framework is for algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-22 Eric Balkanski , Will Ma , Andreas Maggiori

Consumers in many markets are uncertain about firms' qualities and costs, so buy based on both the price and the quality inferred from it. Optimal pricing depends on consumer heterogeneity only when firms with higher quality have higher…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2019-04-12 Sander Heinsalu
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