Related papers: Adaptive Contract Design for Crowdsourcing Markets…
Principal-agent problems model scenarios where a principal incentivizes an agent to take costly, unobservable actions through the provision of payments. Such problems are ubiquitous in several real-world applications, ranging from…
Multi-armed bandit problems are the predominant theoretical model of exploration-exploitation tradeoffs in learning, and they have countless applications ranging from medical trials, to communication networks, to Web search and advertising.…
Multi-armed bandit problems are receiving a great deal of attention because they adequately formalize the exploration-exploitation trade-offs arising in several industrially relevant applications, such as online advertisement and, more…
We consider a general formulation of the Principal-Agent problem with a lump-sum payment on a finite horizon, providing a systematic method for solving such problems. Our approach is the following: we first find the contract that is optimal…
Ranking is fundamental to many areas, such as search engine optimization, human feedback for language models, as well as peer grading. Crowdsourcing, which is often used for these tasks, requires proper incentivization to ensure accurate…
This paper considers the hidden-action model of the principal-agent problem, in which a principal incentivizes an agent to work on a project using a contract. We investigate whether contracts with bounded payments are learnable and…
We study principal-agent problems in which a principal commits to an outcome-dependent payment scheme -- called contract -- in order to induce an agent to take a costly, unobservable action leading to favorable outcomes. We consider a…
Sponsored search positions are typically allocated through real-time auctions, where the outcomes depend on advertisers' quality-adjusted bids - the product of their bids and quality scores. Although quality scoring helps promote ads with…
In this paper, we consider a novel variant of the multi-armed bandit (MAB) problem, MAB with cost subsidy, which models many real-life applications where the learning agent has to pay to select an arm and is concerned about optimizing…
We study a novel multi-armed bandit problem that models the challenge faced by a company wishing to explore new strategies to maximize revenue whilst simultaneously maintaining their revenue above a fixed baseline, uniformly over time.…
Mobile crowdsourcing refers to systems where the completion of tasks necessarily requires physical movement of crowdworkers in an on-demand workforce. Evidence suggests that in such systems, tasks often get assigned to crowdworkers who…
We introduce a novel model of contracts with combinatorial actions that accounts for sequential and adaptive agent behavior. As in the standard model, a principal delegates the execution of a costly project to an agent. There are $n$…
We study a generalization of the multi-armed bandit problem with multiple plays where there is a cost associated with pulling each arm and the agent has a budget at each time that dictates how much she can expect to spend. We derive an…
We define and analyze a multi-agent multi-armed bandit problem in which decision-making agents can observe the choices and rewards of their neighbors under a linear observation cost. Neighbors are defined by a network graph that encodes the…
Crowdsourced on-demand services offer benefits such as reduced costs, faster service fulfillment times, greater adaptability, and contributions to sustainable urban transportation in on-demand delivery contexts. However, the success of an…
Sequential learning in a multi-agent resource constrained matching market has received significant interest in the past few years. We study decentralized learning in two-sided matching markets where the demand side (aka players or agents)…
We consider the problem of optimal budget allocation for crowdsourcing problems, allocating users to tasks to maximize our final confidence in the crowdsourced answers. Such an optimized worker assignment method allows us to boost the…
Multi-armed bandit algorithms provide solutions for sequential decision-making where learning takes place by interacting with the environment. In this work, we model a distributed optimization problem as a multi-agent kernelized multi-armed…
We study a decentralized cooperative stochastic multi-armed bandit problem with $K$ arms on a network of $N$ agents. In our model, the reward distribution of each arm is the same for each agent and rewards are drawn independently across…
We study a decentralized multi-agent multi-armed bandit problem in which multiple clients are connected by time dependent random graphs provided by an environment. The reward distributions of each arm vary across clients and rewards are…