Related papers: Behavioral Mechanism Design: Optimal Contests for …
The hidden-action model captures a fundamental problem of principal-agent theory and provides an optimal sharing rule when only the outcome but not the effort can be observed. However, the hidden-action model builds on various explicit and…
Critical sectors of human society are progressing toward the adoption of powerful artificial intelligence (AI) agents, which are trained individually on behalf of self-interested principals but deployed in a shared environment. Short of…
Incentive design problems consider a system planner who steers self-interested agents toward a socially optimal Nash equilibrium by issuing incentives in the presence of information asymmetry, that is, uncertainty about the agents' cost…
Good economic mechanisms depend on the preferences of participants in the mechanism. For example, the revenue-optimal auction for selling an item is parameterized by a reserve price, and the appropriate reserve price depends on how much the…
We study a decision-maker's problem of finding optimal monetary incentive schemes for retention when faced with agents whose participation decisions (stochastically) depend on the incentive they receive. Our focus is on policies constrained…
In this work we are concerned with the design of efficient mechanisms while eliciting limited information from the agents. First, we study the performance of sampling approximations in facility location games. Our key result is to show that…
In competitive resource allocation, a central coordinator may seek to gain an advantage not by directly controlling subordinate agents, but by strategically manipulating the information they receive. We study this problem within the…
In many scenarios, a principal dynamically interacts with an agent and offers a sequence of incentives to align the agent's behavior with a desired objective. This paper focuses on the problem of synthesizing an incentive sequence that,…
Recent work has considered theoretical models for the behavior of agents with specific behavioral biases: rather than making decisions that optimize a given payoff function, the agent behaves inefficiently because its decisions suffer 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…
In this paper, we consider the problem of a Principal aiming at designing a reward function for a population of heterogeneous agents. We construct an incentive based on the ranking of the agents, so that a competition among the latter is…
This work considers a repeated principal-agent bandit game, where the principal can only interact with her environment through the agent. The principal and the agent have misaligned objectives and the choice of action is only left to the…
Shortlisting is a common and effective method for pre-selecting participants in competitive settings. To ensure fairness, a cut-off score is typically announced, allowing only contestants who exceed it to enter the contest, while others are…
In the classical principal-agent hidden-action contract model, a principal delegates the execution of a costly task to an agent. In order to complete the task, the agent chooses an action from a set of actions, where each potential action…
We study incentive design when multiple principals simultaneously design mechanisms for their respective teams in environments with strategic spillovers. In this environment, each principal's set of incentive-compatible mechanisms--those…
We study a model of delegation in which a principal takes a multidimensional action and an agent has private information about a multidimensional state of the world. The principal can design any direct mechanism, including stochastic ones.…
How to optimally persuade an agent who has a private type? When elicitation is feasible, this amounts to a fairly standard principal-agent-style mechanism design problem, where the persuader employs a mechanism to first elicit the agent's…
All-pay auctions, a common mechanism for various human and agent interactions, suffers, like many other mechanisms, from the possibility of players' failure to participate in the auction. We model such failures, and fully characterize…
Mechanisms such as auctions and pricing schemes are utilized to design strategic (noncooperative) games for networked systems. Although the participating players are selfish, these mechanisms ensure that the game outcome is optimal with…
Designing a good reward function is essential to robot planning and reinforcement learning, but it can also be challenging and frustrating. The reward needs to work across multiple different environments, and that often requires many…