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Recently, Frazier et al. proposed a natural model for crowdsourced exploration of different a priori unknown options: a principal is interested in the long-term welfare of a population of agents who arrive one by one in a multi-armed bandit…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2015-12-29 Li Han , David Kempe , Ruixin Qiang

In consequential domains, it is often impossible to compel individuals to take treatment, so that optimal policy rules are merely suggestions in the presence of human non-adherence to treatment recommendations. We study personalized…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-24 Angela Zhou

In bandit settings, optimizing long-term regret metrics requires exploration, which corresponds to sometimes taking myopically sub-optimal actions. When a long-lived principal merely recommends actions to be executed by a sequence of…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-02-25 Ramya Ramalingam , Osbert Bastani , Aaron Roth

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

In the mechanism design theory, a designer would like to implement a desired social choice function which specifies her favorite outcome for each possible profile of all agents' types. Traditionally, the designer may be in a dilemma in the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2019-06-04 Haoyang Wu

We study whether a social planner can improve the efficiency of learning, measured by the expected total welfare loss, in a sequential decision-making environment. Agents arrive in order and each makes a binary action based on their private…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-02-10 Florian Brandl , Wanying Huang , Atulya Jain

Models of economic decision makers often include idealized assumptions, such as rationality, perfect foresight, and access to all relevant pieces of information. These assumptions often assure the models' internal validity, but, at the same…

General Economics · Economics 2021-07-09 Patrick Reinwald , Stephan Leitner , Friederike Wall

Consider a bandit algorithm that recommends actions to self-interested users in a recommendation system. The users are free to choose other actions and need to be incentivized to follow the algorithm's recommendations. While the users…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-02 Xinyan Hu , Dung Daniel Ngo , Aleksandrs Slivkins , Zhiwei Steven Wu

Motivated by applications such as college admission and insurance rate determination, we propose an evaluation problem where the inputs are controlled by strategic individuals who can modify their features at a cost. A learner can only…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2020-11-05 Nika Haghtalab , Nicole Immorlica , Brendan Lucier , Jack Z. Wang

A sequential decision-making agent balances between exploring to gain new knowledge about an environment and exploiting current knowledge to maximize immediate reward. For environments studied in the traditional literature, optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-23 Dilip Arumugam , Wanqiao Xu , Benjamin Van Roy

We propose and design recommendation systems that incentivize efficient exploration. Agents arrive sequentially, choose actions and receive rewards, drawn from fixed but unknown action-specific distributions. The recommendation system…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-04-02 Nicole Immorlica , Jieming Mao , Aleksandrs Slivkins , Zhiwei Steven Wu

We consider incentivized exploration: a version of multi-armed bandits where the choice of arms is controlled by self-interested agents, and the algorithm can only issue recommendations. The algorithm controls the flow of information, and…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-06-14 Mark Sellke , Aleksandrs Slivkins

Causal discovery is crucial for understanding complex systems and informing decisions. While observational data can uncover causal relationships under certain assumptions, it often falls short, making active interventions necessary. Current…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-18 Yuxuan Wang , Mingzhou Liu , Xinwei Sun , Wei Wang , Yizhou Wang

We analyze the problem of learning a single user's preferences in an active learning setting, sequentially and adaptively querying the user over a finite time horizon. Learning is conducted via choice-based queries, where the user selects…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2017-02-27 Stephen N. Pallone , Peter I. Frazier , Shane G. Henderson

In practice, incentive providers (i.e., principals) often cannot observe the reward realizations of incentivized agents, which is in contrast to many principal-agent models that have been previously studied. This information asymmetry…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-15 Ilgin Dogan , Zuo-Jun Max Shen , Anil Aswani

We consider the problem of planning with participation constraints introduced in [Zhang et al., 2022]. In this problem, a principal chooses actions in a Markov decision process, resulting in separate utilities for the principal and the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-05-17 Hanrui Zhang , Yu Cheng , Vincent Conitzer

We address the problem of Bayesian reinforcement learning using efficient model-based online planning. We propose an optimism-free Bayes-adaptive algorithm to induce deeper and sparser exploration with a theoretical bound on its performance…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-30 Divya Grover , Debabrota Basu , Christos Dimitrakakis

Many interventions, such as vaccines in clinical trials or coupons in online marketplaces, must be assigned sequentially without full knowledge of their effects. Multi-armed bandit algorithms have proven successful in such settings.…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-07 Aidan Gleich , Eric Laber , Alexander Volfovsky

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

We study the problem of designing an optimal sequence of incentives that a principal should offer to an agent so that the agent's optimal behavior under the incentives realizes the principal's objective expressed as a temporal logic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-03-20 Yagiz Savas , Vijay Gupta , Melkior Ornik , Lillian J. Ratliff , Ufuk Topcu