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Related papers: Delegated Search Approximates Efficient Search

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The paper considers the problem of a leader that seeks to optimally influence the opinions of agents in a directed network through connecting with a limited number of the agents ("direct followers"), possibly in the presence of a fixed…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-06-20 Van Sy Mai , Eyad H. Abed

Distributed estimation that recruits potentially large groups of humans to collect data about a phenomenon of interest has emerged as a paradigm applicable to a broad range of detection and estimation tasks. However, it also presents a…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-01-28 Kewei Chen , Donya Ghavidel , Vijay Gupta , Yih-Fang Huang

Fraud can pose a challenge in many resource allocation domains, including social service delivery and credit provision. For example, agents may misreport private information in order to gain benefits or access to credit. To mitigate this, a…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-04-29 Sanmay Das , Fang-Yi Yu , Yuang Zhang

We study the distributed facility location problem, where a set of agents with positions on the line of real numbers are partitioned into disjoint districts, and the goal is to choose a point to satisfy certain criteria, such as optimize an…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-01-05 Aris Filos-Ratsikas , Panagiotis Kanellopoulos , Alexandros A. Voudouris , Rongsen Zhang

A principal who values an object allocates it to one or more agents. Agents learn private information (signals) from an information designer about the allocation payoff to the principal. Monetary transfer is not available but the principal…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2022-10-31 Yi-Chun Chen , Gaoji Hu , Xiangqian Yang

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…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-11-27 Tomer Ezra , Stefano Leonardi , Matteo Russo

We study a screening problem in which an agent privately observes a set of feasible technologies and can strategically disclose only a subset to the principal. The principal then takes an action whose payoff consequences for both players…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-01-23 Tan Gan , Yingkai Li

Strategic learning studies how decision rules interact with agents who may strategically change their inputs/features to achieve better outcomes. In standard settings, models assume that the decision-maker's sole scope is to learn a…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Valia Efthymiou , Ekaterina Fedorova , Chara Podimata

In principal-agent models, a principal offers a contract to an agent to perform a certain task. The agent exerts a level of effort that maximizes her utility. The principal is oblivious to the agent's chosen level of effort, and conditions…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-07-14 Alon Cohen , Moran Koren , Argyrios Deligkas

As AI technologies improve, people are increasingly willing to delegate tasks to AI agents. In many cases, the human decision-maker chooses whether to delegate to an AI agent based on properties of the specific instance of the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Sophie Greenwood , Karen Levy , Solon Barocas , Hoda Heidari , Jon Kleinberg

Incentives are more likely to elicit desired outcomes when they are designed based on accurate models of agents' strategic behavior. A growing literature, however, suggests that people do not quite behave like standard economic agents in a…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2014-06-09 Arpita Ghosh , Robert Kleinberg

We study the role of regulatory inspections in a contract design problem in which a principal interacts separately with multiple agents. Each agent's hidden action includes a dimension that determines whether they undertake an extra costly…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-11-07 Alireza Fallah , Michael I. Jordan

We study delegated Bayesian persuasion: a principal incentivizes an intermediary to design information via outcome-contingent transfers, while the intermediary privately chooses the experiment subject to convex costs. We characterize…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-04-27 Wilfried Youmbi Fotso , Xun Chen

Preference elicitation is a central problem in AI, and has received significant attention in single-agent settings. It is also a key problem in multiagent systems, but has received little attention here so far. In this setting, the agents…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2007-05-23 Vincent Conitzer , Tuomas Sandholm

We consider a moral hazard problem with multiple principals in a continuous-time model. The agent can only work exclusively for one principal at a given time, so faces an optimal switching problem. Using a randomized formulation, we manage…

Probability · Mathematics 2022-09-14 Kaitong Hu , Zhenjie Ren , Junjian Yang

We study the selection of agents based on mutual nominations, a theoretical problem with many applications from committee selection to AI alignment. As agents both select and are selected, they may be incentivized to misrepresent their true…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Javier Cembrano , Felix Fischer , Max Klimm

As AI systems enter institutional workflows, workers must decide whether to delegate task execution to AI and how much effort to invest in verifying AI outputs, while institutions evaluate workers using outcome-based standards that may…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Lingxiao Huang , Wenyang Xiao , Nisheeth K. Vishnoi

We study a principal-agent problem with adverse selection, where the principal does not know the agent's true cost but must design a contract to optimize a specific criterion. Unlike standard screening frameworks that allow for…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-05-19 Guillermo Alonso Alvarez , Ibrahim Ekren , Liwei Huang

We study distributed (strongly convex) optimization problems over a network of agents, with no centralized nodes. The loss functions of the agents are assumed to be \textit{similar}, due to statistical data similarity or otherwise. In order…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-04-12 Ye Tian , Gesualdo Scutari , Tianyu Cao , Alexander Gasnikov

Motivated by the emergence of decentralized machine learning (ML) ecosystems, we study the delegation of data collection. Taking the field of contract theory as our starting point, we design optimal and near-optimal contracts that deal with…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-11-21 Nivasini Ananthakrishnan , Stephen Bates , Michael I. Jordan , Nika Haghtalab