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I study whether and which expert incentives can be provided at what cost when the states of the world become non-contractible, but there is some noisy observation about the states that can be contracted upon. A principal hires an agent to…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-11-12 Zizhe Xia

Algorithmic decision making is increasingly prevalent, but often vulnerable to strategic manipulation by agents seeking a favorable outcome. Prior research has shown that classifier abstention (allowing a classifier to decline making a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-03 Lina Alkarmi , Ziyuan Huang , Mingyan Liu

This paper studies the optimal mechanism to motivate effort in a dynamic principal-agent model without transfers. An agent is engaged in a task with uncertain future rewards and can quit at any time. The principal knows the reward and…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-01-16 Chang Liu

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

When deciding how to act under uncertainty, agents may choose to act to reduce uncertainty or they may act despite that uncertainty. In communicative settings, an important way of reducing uncertainty is by asking clarification questions…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Polina Tsvilodub , Karl Mulligan , Todd Snider , Robert D. Hawkins , Michael Franke

We discuss voting scenarios in which the set of voters (agents) and the set of alternatives are the same; that is, voters select a single representative from among themselves. Such a scenario happens, for instance, when a committee selects…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2019-07-23 Yakov Babichenko , Oren Dean , Moshe Tennenholtz

A principal and an agent divide a surplus. Only the agent knows the surplus' true size and decides how much of it to reveal initially. Both parties can exert costly effort to conclusively prove the surplus' true size. The agent's liability…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-10-20 Deniz Kattwinkel , Justus Preusser

Formal verification of multi-agent systems is hard, both theoretically and in practice. In particular, studies that use a single verification technique typically show limited efficiency, and allow to verify only toy examples. Here, we…

How to incentivize self-interested agents to explore when they prefer to exploit? Consider a population of self-interested agents that make decisions under uncertainty. They "explore" to acquire new information and "exploit" this…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-10-23 Aleksandrs Slivkins

Environments with fixed adjustment costs such as transaction costs or \lq menu costs\rq$ $ are widespread within economic systems. The presence of fixed minimal adjustment costs produces adjustment stickiness so that agents must choose a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-10-09 David Mguni

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

We study a model of consensus decision making, in which a finite group of Bayesian agents has to choose between one of two courses of action. Each member of the group has a private and independent signal at his or her disposal, giving some…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2018-04-24 Elchanan Mossel , Omer Tamuz

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…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-04-22 Hiroto Sato , Ryo Shirakawa

In many decision-making scenarios, individuals strategically choose what information to disclose to optimize their own outcomes. It is unclear whether such strategic information disclosure can lead to good societal outcomes. To address this…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-04-07 Siddhartha Banerjee , Kamesh Munagala , Yiheng Shen , Kangning Wang

We analyze Assessment Voting, a new two-round voting procedure that can be applied to binary decisions in democratic societies. In the first round, a randomly-selected number of citizens cast their vote on one of the two alternatives at…

Econometrics · Economics 2018-02-06 Hans Gersbach , Akaki Mamageishvili , Oriol Tejada

We show that in delegation problems, a principal benefits from belief misalignment vis-\`a-vis an agent when the latter can flexibly acquire costly information. The agent optimally succumbs to confirmatory learning, leading him to favor the…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-07-30 Pavel Ilinov , Andrei Matveenko , Maxim Senkov , Egor Starkov

Voting rules may implement the will of the society when all eligible voters vote, and only them. However, they may fail to do so when sybil (fake or duplicate) votes are present and when only some honest (non sybil) voters actively…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Reshef Meir , Gal Shahaf , Ehud Shapiro , Nimrod Talmon

We study a setting in which a principal selects an agent to execute a collection of tasks according to a specified priority sequence. Agents, however, have their own individual priority sequences according to which they wish to execute the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-10-30 Donya G. Dobakhshari , Lav R. Varshney , Vijay Gupta

Methods for learning optimal policies in autonomous agents often assume that the way the domain is conceptualised---its possible states and actions and their causal structure---is known in advance and does not change during learning. This…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-01-11 Craig Innes , Alex Lascarides , Stefano V Albrecht , Subramanian Ramamoorthy , Benjamin Rosman

Firms increasingly delegate decisions to learning algorithms in platform markets. Standard algorithms perform well when platform policies are stationary, but firms often face ambiguity about whether policies are stationary or adapt…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-02-11 Kyohei Okumura