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In the standard Mechanism Design framework, agents' messages are gathered at a central point and allocation/tax functions are calculated in a centralized manner, i.e., as functions of all network agents' messages. This requirement may cause…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2019-10-10 Nasimeh Heydaribeni , Achilleas Anastasopoulos

We consider Incentive Decision Processes, where a principal seeks to reduce its costs due to another agent's behavior, by offering incentives to the agent for alternate behavior. We focus on the case where a principal interacts with a…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2012-10-19 Sashank J. Reddi , Emma Brunskill

A designer relies on an experimenter to provide information to a decision maker, but the experimenter has incentives to persuade rather than merely transmit information. Anticipating this motive, the designer can restrict the set of…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-05-05 Francesco Bilotta , Christoph Carnehl , Justus Preusser

Distributed optimization finds applications in large-scale machine learning, data processing and classification over multi-agent networks. In real-world scenarios, the communication network of agents may encounter latency that may affect…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-10-06 Mohammadreza Doostmohammadian , Narahari Kasagatta Ramesh , Alireza Aghasi

In many multiagent domains a set of agents exert effort towards a joint outcome, yet the individual effort levels cannot be easily observed. A typical example for such a scenario is routing in communication networks, where the sender can…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2014-01-17 Moshe Babaioff , Michal Feldman , Noam Nisan

In this paper, we consider a general distributed system with multiple agents who select and then implement actions in the system. The system has an operator with a centralized objective. The agents, on the other hand, are selfinterested and…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2020-01-15 Donya Ghavidel , Pratyush Chakraborty , Enrique Baeyens , Vijay Gupta , Pramod P. Khargonekar

LLMs often underperform on complex reasoning tasks when relying on a single generation-and-selection pipeline. Inference-time ensemble methods can improve performance by sampling diverse reasoning paths or aggregating multiple candidate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Tong Zhu , Baiting Chen , Jin Zhou , Hua Zhou , Sriram Sankararaman , Xiaowu Dai

We introduce an agent-based model of delegation relationships between a principal and an agent, which is based on the standard-hidden action model introduced by Holmstr\"om and, by doing so, provide a model which can be used to further…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2020-09-29 Patrick Reinwald , Stephan Leitner , Friederike Wall

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…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-11-01 Jiarui Gan , Abheek Ghosh , Nicholas Teh

The fundamental assignment problem is in search of welfare maximization mechanisms to allocate items to agents when the private preferences over indivisible items are provided by self-interested agents. The mainstream mechanism…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2019-06-04 Yansong Gao , Jie Zhang

This paper develops a decomposition methodology for common agency games in which each principal's payoff depends on her own outcome and the agent's type, but not on rivals' outcomes. The key step reduces each principal's best-response…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-04-28 Zhiming Feng

We study principal-agent problems in which a principal commits to an outcome-dependent payment scheme (a.k.a. contract) so as to induce an agent to take a costly, unobservable action. We relax the assumption that the principal perfectly…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2021-06-02 Matteo Castiglioni , Alberto Marchesi , Nicola Gatti

We introduce a new model of combinatorial contracts in which a principal delegates the execution of a costly task to an agent. To complete the task, the agent can take any subset of a given set of unobservable actions, each of which has an…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Paul Duetting , Tomer Ezra , Michal Feldman , Thomas Kesselheim

I study how organizations assign tasks to identify the best candidate to promote among a pool of workers. Task allocation and workers' motivation interact through the organization's promotion decisions. The organization designs the workers'…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2023-08-11 Théo Durandard

This brief note considers the problem of learning with dynamic-optimizing principal-agent setting, in which the agents are allowed to have global perspectives about the learning process, i.e., the ability to view things according to their…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-12 Getachew K. Befekadu

We study elections where voters are faced with the challenge of expressing preferences over an extreme number of issues under consideration. This is largely motivated by emerging blockchain governance systems, which include voters with…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-05-15 Georgios Amanatidis , Aris Filos-Ratsikas , Philip Lazos , Evangelos Markakis , Georgios Papasotiropoulos

As AI usage becomes more prevalent in social contexts, understanding agent-user interaction is critical to designing systems that improve both individual and group outcomes. We present an online behavioral experiment (N = 243) in which…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Kehang Zhu , Nithum Thain , Vivian Tsai , James Wexler , Crystal Qian

We consider the problem of decentralized constrained optimization with multiple agents $E_1,\ldots,E_N$ who jointly wish to learn the optimal solution set while keeping their feasible sets $\mathcal{P}_1,\ldots,\mathcal{P}_N$ private from…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Shreya Meel , Sennur Ulukus

Delegation allows an agent to request that another agent completes a task. In many situations the task may be delegated onwards, and this process can repeat until it is eventually, successfully or unsuccessfully, performed. We consider…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-04-23 Juan Afanador , Nir Oren , Murilo S. Baptista

The problem of computing near-optimal contracts in combinatorial settings has recently attracted significant interest in the computer science community. Previous work has provided a rich body of structural and algorithmic insights into this…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-06-26 Michal Feldman , Yoav Gal-Tzur , Tomasz Ponitka , Maya Schlesinger