Related papers: Mechanism Design with Limited Commitment

A rapidly growing literature on lying in behavioral economics and psychology shows that individuals often do not lie even when lying maximizes their utility. In this work, we attempt to incorporate these findings into the theory of…

We study information design in games where players choose from a continuum of actions and have continuously differentiable payoffs. We show that an information structure is optimal when the equilibrium it induces can also be implemented in…

As artificial agents become increasingly capable, what internal structure is *necessary* for an agent to act competently under uncertainty? Classical results show that optimal control can be *implemented* using belief states or world…

Mechanisms such as auctions and pricing schemes are utilized to design strategic (noncooperative) games for networked systems. Although the participating players are selfish, these mechanisms ensure that the game outcome is optimal with…

We study information design settings where the designer controls information about a state, and there are multiple agents interacting in a game who are privately informed about their types. Each agent's utility depends on all agents' types…

Mechanism design is now a standard tool in computer science for aligning the incentives of self-interested agents with the objectives of a system designer. There is, however, a fundamental disconnect between the traditional application…

Modeling the purposeful behavior of imperfect agents from a small number of observations is a challenging task. When restricted to the single-agent decision-theoretic setting, inverse optimal control techniques assume that observed behavior…

We study a simple problem of allocating common-value goods. The designer seeks to allocate the goods to as many unit-demand agents as possible without monetary transfers, while agents, who possess partial private information about the…

We study how to optimally design selection mechanisms, accounting for agents' investment incentives. A principal wishes to allocate a resource of homogeneous quality to a heterogeneous population of agents. The principal commits to a…

We develop a versatile methodology for multidimensional mechanism design that incorporates side information about agents to generate high welfare and high revenue simultaneously. Side information sources include advice from domain experts,…

We study the design of mechanisms under asymmetric awareness and information. While the mechanism designer cannot necessarily commit to a particular social choice function in the face of unawareness, she can at least commit to properties of…

Designing protocols enhancing cooperation for multi-agent systems remains a grand challenge. Cheap talk, defined as costless, non-binding communication before formal action, serves as a pivotal solution. However, existing theoretical…

We study decentralized equilibrium selection in stochastic games under severe information and communication constraints. In such settings, convergence to equilibrium alone is insufficient, as stochastic games typically admit many equilibria…

We consider the information design problem in spatial resource competition settings. Agents gather at a location deciding whether to move to another location for possibly higher level of resources, and the utility each agent gets by moving…

Agents that learn to select optimal actions represent a prominent focus of the sequential decision-making literature. In the face of a complex environment or constraints on time and resources, however, aiming to synthesize such an optimal…

We design two mechanisms that ensure that the majority preferred option wins in all equilibria. The first one is a simultaneous game where agents choose other agents to cooperate with on top of the vote for an alternative, thus overcoming…

In mechanism design theory, a designer would like to implement a desired social choice function which specifies her favorite outcome for each possible profile of agents' types. To do so, the designer constructs a mechanism which describes…

We develop an integrated framework for information design and mechanism design in screening environments with quasilinear utility. Using the tools of majorization theory and quantile functions, we show that both information design and…

In dynamic noncooperative games, each player makes conjectures about other players' reactions before choosing a strategy. However, resulting equilibria may be multiple and do not always lead to desirable outcomes. These issues are typically…

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…