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The present bias is a well-documented behavioral trait that significantly influences human decision-making, with present-biased agents often prioritizing immediate rewards over long-term benefits, leading to suboptimal outcomes in various…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-08-27 Tatiana Belova , Yuriy Dementiev , Fedor V. Fomin , Petr A. Golovach , Artur Ignatiev

We study the problem of Envy-Free Incomplete Connected Fair Division, where exactly p vertices of an undirected graph must be allocated to agents such that each agent receives a connected share and does not envy another agent's share.…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2025-12-30 Ajaykrishnan E S , Daniel Lokshtanov

Time-inconsistency is a characteristic of human behavior in which people plan for long-term benefits but take actions that differ from the plan due to conflicts with short-term benefits. Such time-inconsistent behavior is believed to be…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-01-15 Yasunori Akagi , Naoki Marumo , Takeshi Kurashima

We initiate the study of a repeated principal-agent problem over a finite horizon $T$, where a principal sequentially interacts with $K\geq 2$ types of agents arriving in an adversarial order. At each round, the principal strategically…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Junyan Liu , Arnab Maiti , Artin Tajdini , Kevin Jamieson , Lillian J. Ratliff

Agents are systems that optimize an objective function in an environment. Together, the goal and the environment induce secondary objectives, incentives. Modeling the agent-environment interaction using causal influence diagrams, we can…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-01-21 Tom Everitt , Pedro A. Ortega , Elizabeth Barnes , Shane Legg

Everyone puts things off sometimes. How can we combat this tendency to procrastinate? A well-known technique used by instructors is to break up a large project into more manageable chunks. But how should this be done best? Here we study the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-09-26 Joe Halpern , Aditya Saraf

Reward design is a critical part of the application of reinforcement learning, the performance of which strongly depends on how well the reward signal frames the goal of the designer and how well the signal assesses progress in reaching…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-01 Yixiang Wang , Yujing Hu , Feng Wu , Yingfeng Chen

Knowledge-graph-based reasoning has drawn a lot of attention due to its interpretability. However, previous methods suffer from the incompleteness of the knowledge graph, namely the interested link or entity that can be missing in the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-12-06 Yunan Zhang , Xiang Cheng , Heting Gao , Chengxiang Zhai

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-14 Georgios Vasileiou , Lantian Zhang , Silun Zhang

Coordinating agents through hazardous environments, such as aid-delivering drones navigating conflict zones or field robots traversing deployment areas filled with obstacles, poses fundamental planning challenges. We introduce and analyze…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-03-20 Andrzej Kaczmarczyk , Šimon Schierreich , Nicholas Axel Tanujaya , Haifeng Xu

Individuals working towards a goal often exhibit time inconsistent behavior, making plans and then failing to follow through. One well-known model of such behavioral anomalies is present-bias discounting: individuals over-weight present…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2016-06-10 Nick Gravin , Nicole Immorlica , Brendan Lucier , Emmanouil Pountourakis

We consider a finite-horizon discrete-time dynamic system jointly controlled by a designer and one or more agents, where the designer can influence the agents' actions through selective information disclosure. At each time step, the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-08-04 Renyan Sun , Ashutosh Nayyar

We study a natural combinatorial single-principal multi-agent contract design problem, in which a principal motivates a team of agents to exert effort toward a given task. At the heart of our model is a reward function, which maps the agent…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Paul Duetting , Tomer Ezra , Michal Feldman , Thomas Kesselheim

In this paper, we propose a deterministic algorithm that approximates the optimal path cover on weighted undirected graphs. Based on the 1/2-Approximation Path Cover Algorithm by Moran et al., we add a procedure to remove the redundant…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2021-01-25 Junyuan Lin , Guangpeng Ren

We consider the fair allocation of indivisible items to several agents with additional conflict constraints. These are represented by a conflict graph where each item corresponds to a vertex of the graph and edges in the graph represent…

Discrete Mathematics · Computer Science 2023-08-21 Nina Chiarelli , Matjaž Krnc , Martin Milanič , Ulrich Pferschy , Joachim Schauer

In this paper, a distributed subgradient-based algorithm is proposed for continuous-time multi-agent systems to search a feasible solution to convex inequalities. The algorithm involves each agent achieving a state constrained by its own…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2017-06-13 Kaihong Lu , Gangshan Jing , Long Wang

Many combinatorial optimization problems can be formulated as the search for a subgraph that satisfies certain properties and minimizes the total weight. We assume here that the vertices correspond to points in a metric space and can take…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2024-12-25 Marin Bougeret , Jérémy Omer , Michael Poss

Motivated by real-world applications such as the allocation of public housing, we examine the problem of assigning a group of agents to vertices (e.g., spatial locations) of a network so that the diversity level is maximized. Specifically,…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2024-04-02 Zirou Qiu , Andrew Yuan , Chen Chen , Madhav V. Marathe , S. S. Ravi , Daniel J. Rosenkrantz , Richard E. Stearns , Anil Vullikanti

We build upon recent work [Kleinberg and Oren, 2014, Kleinberg et al., 2016, 2017] that considers present biased agents, who place more weight on costs they must incur now than costs they will incur in the future. They consider a graph…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-01-17 Aditya Saraf , Anna R. Karlin , Jamie Morgenstern

Constant-factor, polynomial-time approximation algorithms are presented for two variations of the traveling salesman problem with time windows. In the first variation, the traveling repairman problem, the goal is to find a tour that visits…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2009-05-28 Greg N. Frederickson , Barry Wittman