Related papers: Limitations of Incentive Compatibility on Discrete…

We consider the problem of designing mechanisms that interact with strategic agents through strategic intermediaries (or mediators), and investigate the cost to society due to the mediators' strategic behavior. Selfish agents with private…

Best-response mechanisms (Nisan, Schapira, Valiant, Zohar, 2011) provide a unifying framework for studying various distributed protocols in which the participants are instructed to repeatedly best respond to each others' strategies. Two…

We study some methods of subgradient projections for solving a convex feasibility problem with general (not necessarily hyperplanes or half-spaces) convex sets in the inconsistent case and propose a strategy that controls the relaxation…

In this paper, we propose first-order feasible methods for difference-of-convex (DC) programs with smooth inequality and simple geometric constraints. Our strategy for maintaining feasibility of the iterates is based on a "retraction" idea…

We propose an algorithm for tabular episodic reinforcement learning with constraints. We provide a modular analysis with strong theoretical guarantees for settings with concave rewards and convex constraints, and for settings with hard…

Chance constraints yield non-convex feasible regions in general. In particular, when the uncertain parameters are modeled by a Wasserstein ball, arXiv:1806.07418 and arXiv:1809.00210 showed that the distributionally robust (pessimistic)…

Modern policy optimization methods roughly follow the policy mirror descent (PMD) algorithmic template, for which there are by now numerous theoretical convergence results. However, most of these either target tabular environments, or can…

Despite the numerous advances, reinforcement learning remains away from widespread acceptance for autonomous controller design as compared to classical methods due to lack of ability to effectively tackle the reality gap. The reliance on…

The application of incentives, such as reward and punishment, is a frequently applied way for promoting cooperation among interacting individuals in structured populations. However, how to properly use the incentives is still a challenging…

Auctions in which agents' payoffs are random variables have received increased attention in recent years. In particular, recent work in algorithmic mechanism design has produced mechanisms employing internal randomization, partly in…

Chance constraints are a valuable tool for the design of safe decisions in uncertain environments; they are used to model satisfaction of a constraint with a target probability. However, because of possible non-convexity and non-smoothness,…

A new exact projective penalty method is proposed for the equivalent reduction of constrained optimization problems to nonsmooth unconstrained ones. In the method, the original objective function is extended to infeasible points by summing…

Recent literature shows that dynamic matching mechanisms may outperform the standard mechanisms to deliver desirable results. We highlight an under-explored design dimension, the time constraints that students face under such a dynamic…

We consider incentive compatible mechanisms for a domain that is very close to the domain of scheduling $n$ unrelated machines: the single exception is that the valuation of just one machine is submodular. For the scheduling problem with…

Finding appropriate incentives to enforce collaborative efforts for governing the commons in risky situations is a long-lasting challenge. Previous works have demonstrated that both punishing free-riders and rewarding cooperators could be…

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…

We propose an adaptive incentive mechanism that learns the optimal incentives in environments where players continuously update their strategies. Our mechanism updates incentives based on each player's externality, defined as the difference…

We connect high-dimensional subset selection and submodular maximization. Our results extend the work of Das and Kempe (2011) from the setting of linear regression to arbitrary objective functions. For greedy feature selection, this…

Constrained decision-making is essential for designing safe policies in real-world control systems, yet simulated environments often fail to capture real-world adversities. We consider the problem of learning a policy that will maximize the…

Reinforcement learning from human feedback usually models preferences using a reward function that does not distinguish between people. We argue that this is unlikely to be a good design choice in contexts with high potential for…