Related papers: The Complexity of Contracts
We consider the 0-1 Penalized Knapsack Problem (PKP). Each item has a profit, a weight and a penalty and the goal is to maximize the sum of the profits minus the greatest penalty value of the items included in a solution. We propose an…
The rapid advancement of AI and other emerging technologies has triggered exponential growth in computing resources demand. Faced with prohibitive infrastructure costs for large-scale computing clusters, users are increasingly resorting to…
Affine policies (or control) are widely used as a solution approach in dynamic optimization where computing an optimal adjustable solution is usually intractable. While the worst case performance of affine policies can be significantly bad,…
We consider the problem of scheduling complex-valued demands over a discretized time horizon. Given a set of users, each user is associated with a set of demands representing different power consumption preferences. A demand is represented…
Humans exhibit time-inconsistent behavior, in which planned actions diverge from executed actions. Understanding time inconsistency and designing appropriate interventions is a key research challenge in computer science and behavioral…
We study the hidden-action principal-agent problem in an online setting. In each round, the principal posts a contract that specifies the payment to the agent based on each outcome. The agent then makes a strategic choice of action that…
We study the problems of asymptotic and approximate consensus in which agents have to get their values arbitrarily close to each others' inside the convex hull of initial values, either without or with an explicit decision by the agents. In…
We design an optimal contract between a demand response aggregator (DRA) and a customer for incentive-based demand response. We consider a setting in which the customer is asked to reduce her consumption by the DRA and she is compensated…
Selecting a set of alternatives based on the preferences of agents is an important problem in committee selection and beyond. Among the various criteria put forth for the desirability of a committee, Pareto optimality is a minimal and…
This paper addresses the problem of computing a scheduling policy that minimizes the total expected completion time of a set of $N$ jobs with stochastic processing times on $m$ parallel identical machines. When all processing times follow…
We consider the problem of designing incentive-compatible, ex-post individually rational (IR) mechanisms for covering problems in the Bayesian setting, where players' types are drawn from an underlying distribution and may be correlated,…
Robust optimization provides a principled and unified framework to model many problems in modern operations research and computer science applications, such as risk measures minimization and adversarially robust machine learning. To use a…
In Bipartite Correlation Clustering (BCC) we are given a complete bipartite graph $G$ with `+' and `-' edges, and we seek a vertex clustering that maximizes the number of agreements: the number of all `+' edges within clusters plus all `-'…
We propose a novel formulation for approximating reachable sets through a minimum discounted reward optimal control problem. The formulation yields a continuous solution that can be obtained by solving a Hamilton-Jacobi equation.…
This paper considers a network of agents, where each agent is assumed to take actions optimally with respect to a predefined payoff function involving the latest actions of the agent's neighbors. Neighborhood relationships stem from payoff…
A number of prototypical optimization problems in multi-agent systems (e.g., task allocation and network load-sharing) exhibit a highly local structure: that is, each agent's decision variables are only directly coupled to few other agent's…
It is well-known that acting in an individually rational manner, according to the principles of classical game theory, may lead to sub-optimal solutions in a class of problems named social dilemmas. In contrast, humans generally do not have…
This paper studies contracting in the presence of externalities with a non-contractible outsider. Multiple equilibria arise from strategic symmetry between the insider agent and the outsider. To address strategic uncertainty, the principal…
In this article, we employ a principal-agent model to analyze optimal contract design in a monopolistic reinsurance market under adverse selection with a continuum of insurer types. Instead of using the classical expected utility framework,…
We study the problem of computing maximin share guarantees, a recently introduced fairness notion. Given a set of $n$ agents and a set of goods, the maximin share of a single agent is the best that she can guarantee to herself, if she would…