Related papers: Robust Contracting in General Contract Spaces
An indivisible object may be sold to one of $n$ agents who know their valuations of the object. The seller would like to use a revenue-maximizing mechanism but her knowledge of the valuations' distribution is scarce: she knows only the…
This paper studies a constrained optimization problem over networked systems with an undirected and connected communication topology. The algorithm proposed in this work utilizes singular perturbation, dynamic average consensus, and saddle…
We study a multi-agent contract design problem with moral hazard. In our model, each agent exerts costly effort towards an individual task at which it may either succeed or fail, and the principal, who wishes to encourage effort, has an…
Collaborative machine learning (CML) provides a promising paradigm for democratizing advanced technologies by enabling cost-sharing among participants. However, the potential for rent-seeking behaviors among parties can undermine such…
Distributed locking mechanisms are fundamental to ensuring data consistency and integrity in distributed systems. This paper presents a comprehensive analysis of distributed locking algorithms, focusing on their performance characteristics…
This paper develops a stochastic programming framework for multi-agent systems where task decomposition, assignment, and scheduling problems are simultaneously optimized. The framework can be applied to heterogeneous mobile robot teams with…
Distributionally robust control is a well-studied framework for optimal decision making under uncertainty, with the objective of minimizing an expected cost function over control actions, assuming the most adverse probability distribution…
This paper considers the hidden-action model of the principal-agent problem, in which a principal incentivizes an agent to work on a project using a contract. We investigate whether contracts with bounded payments are learnable and…
This paper considers structural optimization under a reliability constraint, where the input distribution is only partially known. Specifically, when we only know that the expected value vector and the variance-covariance matrix of the…
Strategy-proofness is a fundamental desideratum in mechanism design, ensuring truthful reporting and robust participation. Stability is another central requirement in matching markets, widely adopted in applications such as school choice…
This paper proposes the notion of robust PBE in a general competing mechanism game of incomplete information where a mechanism allows its designer to send a message to himself at the same time agents send messages. It identifies the utility…
Controlling large-scale systems sometimes requires decentralized computation. Communication among agents is crucial to achieving consensus and optimal global behavior. These negotiation mechanisms are sensitive to attacks on those…
Contract theory studies how a principal can incentivize agents to exert costly, unobservable effort through performance-based payments. While classical economic models provide elegant characterizations of optimal solutions, modern…
We study conditions for the existence of stable and group-strategy-proof mechanisms in a many-to-one matching model with contracts if students' preferences are monotone in contract terms. We show that "equivalence", properly defined, to a…
Distributed abstract programs are a novel class of distributed optimization problems where (i) the number of variables is much smaller than the number of constraints and (ii) each constraint is associated to a network node. Abstract…
Our goal is to solve both problems of adverse selection and moral hazard for multi-agent projects. In our model, each selected agent can work according to his private "capability tree". This means a process involving hidden actions, hidden…
This paper introduces a systematic methodological framework to design and analyze distributed algorithms for optimization and games over networks. Starting from a centralized method, we identify an aggregation function involving all the…
We study hidden-action principal-agent problems with multiple agents. Unlike previous work, we consider a general setting in which each agent has an arbitrary number of actions, and the joint action induces outcomes according to an…
Combinatorial contracts are emerging as a key paradigm in algorithmic contract design, paralleling the role of combinatorial auctions in algorithmic mechanism design. In this paper we study natural combinatorial contract settings involving…
In this paper, we consider a network of agents that has to self-assign a set of tasks while respecting resource constraints. One possible formulation is the Generalized Assignment Problem, where the goal is to find a maximum payoff while…