Related papers: On the Complexity of Sequential Incentive Design

Networked public goods games model scenarios in which self-interested agents decide whether or how much to invest in an action that benefits not only themselves, but also their network neighbors. Examples include vaccination, security…

Finding different solutions to the same problem is a key aspect of intelligence associated with creativity and adaptation to novel situations. In reinforcement learning, a set of diverse policies can be useful for exploration, transfer,…

We consider the classic principal-agent model of contract theory, in which a principal designs an outcome-dependent compensation scheme to incentivize an agent to take a costly and unobservable action. When all of the model…

In this paper we consider multi-objective reinforcement learning where the objectives are balanced using preferences. In practice, the preferences are often given in an adversarial manner, e.g., customers can be picky in many applications.…

With reinforcement learning, an agent could learn complex behaviors from high-level abstractions of the task. However, exploration and reward shaping remained challenging for existing methods, especially in scenarios where the extrinsic…

We study misspecified Bayesian learning in principal-agent relationships, where an agent is assessed by an evaluator and rewarded by the market. The agent's outcome depends on their innate ability, costly effort -- whose effectiveness is…

Recent technology advances have enabled firms to flexibly process and analyze sophisticated employee performance data at a reduced and yet significant cost. We develop a theory of optimal incentive contracting where the monitoring…

AI systems often rely on two key components: a specified goal or reward function and an optimization algorithm to compute the optimal behavior for that goal. This approach is intended to provide value for a principal: the user on whose…

We consider a sequential blocked matching (SBM) model where strategic agents repeatedly report ordinal preferences over a set of services to a central planner. The planner's goal is to elicit agents' true preferences and design a policy…

The main challenge of multiagent reinforcement learning is the difficulty of learning useful policies in the presence of other simultaneously learning agents whose changing behaviors jointly affect the environment's transition and reward…

Finding optimal policies which maximize long term rewards of Markov Decision Processes requires the use of dynamic programming and backward induction to solve the Bellman optimality equation. However, many real-world problems require…

A central problem in the theory of multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) is to understand what structural conditions and algorithmic principles lead to sample-efficient learning guarantees, and how these considerations change as we move…

The Bayesian persuasion paradigm of strategic communication models interaction between a privately-informed agent, called the sender, and an ignorant but rational agent, called the receiver. The goal is typically to design a (near-)optimal…

Peer review (e.g., grading assignments in Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), academic paper review) is an effective and scalable method to evaluate the products (e.g., assignments, papers) of a large number of agents when the number of…

Modern approaches to text to speech require the entire input character sequence to be processed before any audio is synthesised. This latency limits the suitability of such models for time-sensitive tasks like simultaneous interpretation.…

We consider incentivized exploration: a version of multi-armed bandits where the choice of arms is controlled by self-interested agents, and the algorithm can only issue recommendations. The algorithm controls the flow of information, and…

Combined prosocial incentives, integrating reward for cooperators and punishment for defectors, are effective tools to promote cooperation among competing agents in population games. Existing research concentrated on how to adjust reward or…

Suppose an agent is in a (possibly unknown) Markov Decision Process in the absence of a reward signal, what might we hope that an agent can efficiently learn to do? This work studies a broad class of objectives that are defined solely as…

Given a Markov decision process (MDP), we seek to learn representations for a range of policies to facilitate behavior steering at test time. As policies of an MDP are uniquely determined by their occupancy measures, we propose modeling…

We present a continuous-time contract whereby a top-level player can incentivize a hierarchy of players below him to act in his best interest despite only observing the output of his direct subordinate. This paper extends Sannikov's…