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In multiagent systems, the complex interaction of fixed incentives can lead agents to outcomes that are poor (inefficient) not only for the group, but also for each individual. Price of anarchy is a technical, game-theoretic definition that…

We consider a financial market model which consists of a financial asset and a large number of interacting agents classified into many types. Different types of agents are heterogeneous in their price expectations. Each agent can change its…

Probability · Mathematics 2008-12-02 Biao Wu

Incentive design deals with interaction between a principal and an agent where the former can shape the latter's utility through a policy commitment. It is well known that the principal faces an information rent when dealing with an agent…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Raj Kiriti Velicheti , Subhonmesh Bose , Tamer Başar

In financial markets, agents often mutually influence each other's investment strategies and adjust their strategies to align with others. However, there is limited quantitative study of agents' investment strategies in such scenarios. In…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-01-27 Huisheng Wang , H. Vicky Zhao

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…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-05-11 Brian Roberson

We study a problem where a group of agents has to decide how some fixed value should be shared among them. We are interested in settings where the share that each agent receives is based on how that agent is evaluated by other members of…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2013-06-04 Arthur Carvalho , Kate Larson

Goal recognition aims at predicting human intentions from a trace of observations. This ability allows people or organizations to anticipate future actions and intervene in a positive (collaborative) or negative (adversarial) way. Goal…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-11-04 Daniel Borrajo , Sriram Gopalakrishnan , Vamsi K. Potluru

We introduce a unified mathematical and probabilistic framework for understanding and comparing diverse AI agent strategies. We bridge the gap between high-level agent design concepts, such as ReAct, multi-agent systems, and control flows,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-05 Philip Stephens , Emmanuel Salawu

We consider the problem of learning to behave optimally in a Markov Decision Process when a reward function is not specified, but instead we have access to a set of demonstrators of varying performance. We assume the demonstrators are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-08-01 Pablo Samuel Castro , Shijian Li , Daqing Zhang

In many real-world tasks, it is not possible to procedurally specify an RL agent's reward function. In such cases, a reward function must instead be learned from interacting with and observing humans. However, current techniques for reward…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-12-11 Eric J. Michaud , Adam Gleave , Stuart Russell

Reward schemes may affect not only agents' effort, but also their incentives to gather information to reduce the riskiness of the productive activity. In a laboratory experiment using a novel task, we find that the relationship between…

General Economics · Economics 2024-09-11 Philip Brookins , Jennifer Brown , Dmitry Ryvkin

Participation incentives is a well-known issue inhibiting randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in medicine, as well as a potential cause of user dissatisfaction for RCTs in online platforms. We frame this issue as a non-standard…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Yingkai Li , Aleksandrs Slivkins

For many tasks, the reward function is inaccessible to introspection or too complex to be specified procedurally, and must instead be learned from user data. Prior work has evaluated learned reward functions by evaluating policies optimized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-19 Adam Gleave , Michael Dennis , Shane Legg , Stuart Russell , Jan Leike

Reward function, as an incentive representation that recognizes humans' agency and rationalizes humans' actions, is particularly appealing for modeling human behavior in human-robot interaction. Inverse Reinforcement Learning is an…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-03-09 Ran Tian , Masayoshi Tomizuka , Liting Sun

Learning about many things can provide numerous benefits to a reinforcement learning system. For example, learning many auxiliary value functions, in addition to optimizing the environmental reward, appears to improve both exploration and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-25 Cam Linke , Nadia M. Ady , Martha White , Thomas Degris , Adam White

For groups of autonomous agents to achieve a particular goal, they must engage in coordination and long-horizon reasoning. However, designing reward functions to elicit such behavior is challenging. In this paper, we study how…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-16 Chirayu Nimonkar , Shlok Shah , Catherine Ji , Benjamin Eysenbach

Modeling the preferences of agents over a set of alternatives is a principal concern in many areas. The dominant approach has been to find a single reward/utility function with the property that alternatives yielding higher rewards are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-09 Alihan Hüyük , William R. Zame , Mihaela van der Schaar

We study the design of optimal incentives in sequential processes. To do so, we consider a basic and fundamental model in which an agent initiates a value-creating sequential process through costly investment with random success. If…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2023-11-22 Jens Gudmundsson , Jens Leth Hougaard , Juan D. Moreno-Ternero , Lars Peter Østerdal

This paper explores an intrinsic motivation for mutual awareness, hypothesizing that humans possess a fundamental drive to understand and to be understood even in the absence of extrinsic rewards. Through simulations of the perceptual…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-11 Chrisantha Fernando , Dylan Banarse , Simon Osindero

In this paper I present several algorithmic techniques for improving the decision process of multiple types of agents behaving in environments where their interests are in conflict. The interactions between the agents are modelled by using…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2009-08-04 Mugurel Ionut Andreica