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Biological systems often choose actions without an explicit reward signal, a phenomenon known as intrinsic motivation. The computational principles underlying this behavior remain poorly understood. In this study, we investigate an…
We study a persuasion problem in which a sender designs an information structure to induce a non-Bayesian receiver to take a particular action. The receiver, who is privately informed about his preferences, is a wishful thinker: he is…
We consider a moral hazard problem with multiple principals in a continuous-time model. The agent can only work exclusively for one principal at a given time, so faces an optimal switching problem. Using a randomized formulation, we manage…
In many settings, an effective way of evaluating objects of interest is to collect evaluations from dispersed individuals and to aggregate these evaluations together. Some examples are categorizing online content and evaluating student…
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…
I study how organizations assign tasks to identify the best candidate to promote among a pool of workers. Task allocation and workers' motivation interact through the organization's promotion decisions. The organization designs the workers'…
We study the consequences of information asymmetries and misaligned incentives in settings with multiple independent agents. We model an interaction between a Sender, who holds vital private information but cannot act, and a Receiver, who…
In a decision-making scenario, a principal could use conditional predictions from an expert agent to inform their choice. However, this approach would introduce a fundamental conflict of interest. An agent optimizing for predictive accuracy…
Causal models bring many benefits to decision-making systems (or agents) by making them interpretable, sample-efficient, and robust to changes in the input distribution. However, spurious correlations can lead to wrong causal models and…
In this work we investigate the inefficiency of the electricity system with strategic agents. Specifically, we prove that without a proper control the total demand of an inefficient system is at most twice the total demand of the optimal…
A principal provides nondiscriminatory incentives for independent and identical agents. The principal cannot observe the agents' actions, nor does she know the entire set of actions available to them. It is shown, very generally, that any…
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…
We consider a two-road dynamic routing game where the state of one of the roads (the "risky road") is stochastic and may change over time. This generates room for experimentation. A central planner may wish to induce some of the (finite…
Consider a multi-agent systems setup in which a principal (a supervisor agent) assigns subtasks to specialized agents and aggregates their responses into a single system-level output. A core property of such systems is information…
A rich class of mechanism design problems can be understood as incomplete-information games between a principal who commits to a policy and an agent who responds, with payoffs determined by an unknown state of the world. Traditionally,…
In the classical principal-agent hidden-action contract model, a principal delegates the execution of a costly task to an agent. In order to complete the task, the agent chooses an action from a set of actions, where each potential action…
In this paper we revisit the basic variant of the classical secretary problem. We propose a new approach in which we separate between an agent that evaluates the secretary performance and one that has to make the hiring decision. The…
From the social sciences to machine learning, it has been well documented that metrics to be optimized are not always aligned with social welfare. In healthcare, Dranove et al. (2003) showed that publishing surgery mortality metrics…
We present a framework for analysing agent incentives using causal influence diagrams. We establish that a well-known criterion for value of information is complete. We propose a new graphical criterion for value of control, establishing…
We study repeated task assignment as an instrument for providing effort incentives. Unlike traditional incentive instruments, assignment of a task both determines who produces and provides incentives, and incentives for one worker spill…