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Related papers: Contracts for acquiring information

200 papers

The assignment problem is one of the most well-studied settings in social choice, matching, and discrete allocation. We consider the problem with the additional feature that agents' preferences involve uncertainty. The setting with…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2016-10-11 Haris Aziz , Ronald de Haan , Baharak Rastegari

We study a principal-agent team production model. The principal hires a team of agents to participate in a common production task. The exact effort of each agent is unobservable and unverifiable, but the total production outcome (e.g. the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Shiliang Zuo

We study the distortion of one-sided and two-sided matching problems on the line. In the one-sided case, $n$ agents need to be matched to $n$ items, and each agent's cost in a matching is their distance from the item they were matched to.…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-02-04 Aris Filos-Ratsikas , Vasilis Gkatzelis , Mohamad Latifian , Emma Rewinski , Alexandros A. Voudouris

The accessible information and the informational power quantify the maximum amount of information that can be extracted from a quantum ensemble and by a quantum measurement, respectively. Here, we investigate the tradeoff between the…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2019-06-05 Michele Dall'Arno , Francesco Buscemi

In this thesis, I reflect on quantum instruments that measure the state of pure finite dimensional quantum systems. As the Heisenberg principle dictates, there exists a joint restriction to the information gain and distortion by measurement…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2007-05-23 Thijs van der Valk

We consider the problem of transmitting data at rate R over a state dependent channel p(y|x,s) with the state information available at the sender and at the same time conveying the information about the channel state itself to the receiver.…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2016-11-17 Young-Han Kim , Arak Sutivong , Thomas M. Cover

In practice, most mechanisms for selling, buying, matching, voting, and so on are not incentive compatible. We present techniques for estimating how far a mechanism is from incentive compatible. Given samples from the agents' type…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-12-12 Maria-Florina Balcan , Tuomas Sandholm , Ellen Vitercik

We modify the standard model of price competition with horizontally differentiated products, imperfect information, and search frictions by allowing consumers to flexibly acquire information about a product's match value during their…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2021-04-28 Vasudha Jain , Mark Whitmeyer

We study a setting where a set of agents engage in pairwise exchanges of freely replicable goods (e.g., digital goods such as data), where two agents grant each other a copy of a good they possess in exchange for a good they lack. Such…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Shangyuan Yang , Kirthevasan Kandasamy

We study the costs and benefits of selling data to a competitor. Although selling all consumers' data may decrease total firm profits, there exist other selling mechanisms -- in which only some consumers' data is sold -- that render both…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-07-12 Ronen Gradwohl , Moshe Tennenholtz

We consider sequential search by an agent who cannot observe the quality of goods but can acquire information by buying signals from a profit-maximizing principal with limited commitment power. The principal can charge higher prices for…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2024-08-13 Teddy Mekonnen , Zeky Murra-Anton , Bobak Pakzad-Hurson

We consider an outsourcing problem where a software agent procures multiple services from providers with uncertain reliabilities to complete a computational task before a strict deadline. The service consumer requires a procurement strategy…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2021-10-26 Farzaneh Farhadi , Maria Chli , Nicholas R. Jennings

An agent choosing between various actions tends to take the one with the lowest cost. But this choice is arguably too rigid (not adaptive) to be useful in complex situations, e.g., where exploration-exploitation trade-off is relevant in…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2018-12-04 Armen E. Allahverdyan , Aram Galstyan , Ali E. Abbas , Zbigniew R. Struzik

We study linear-quadratic games of incomplete information with Gaussian uncertainty, where each player's payoff depends on a privately observed type and a common state. The designer observes the state, elicits types, and sells action…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Alessandro Bonatti , Munther A. Dahleh , Thibaut Horel

In a framework close to the one developed by Holmstr\"om and Milgrom [44], we study the optimal contracting scheme between a Principal and several Agents. Each hired Agent is in charge of one project, and can make efforts towards managing…

Economics · Quantitative Finance 2016-05-27 Romuald Elie , Dylan Possamaï

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…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-11-27 Tomer Ezra , Stefano Leonardi , Matteo Russo

We study the combinatorial contracting problem of D\"utting et al. [FOCS '21], in which a principal seeks to incentivize an agent to take a set of costly actions. In their model, there is a binary outcome (the agent can succeed or fail),…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-09-20 Paul Dütting , Michal Feldman , Yoav Gal Tzur

It has been shown that one can accommodate data (Bayes) and constraints (MaxEnt) in one method, the method of Maximum (relative) Entropy (ME) (Giffin 2007). In this paper we show a complex agent based example of inference with two different…

Methodology · Statistics 2016-09-08 Adom Giffin

The central result of this paper is the analysis of an optimization problem which allows one to assess the limiting performance of a team of two agents who coordinate their actions. One agent is fully informed about the past and future…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2014-09-08 Benjamin Larrousse , Achal Agrawal , Samson Lasaulce

We study information design settings where the designer controls information about a state, and there are multiple agents interacting in a game who are privately informed about their types. Each agent's utility depends on all agents' types…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2022-01-31 Ozan Candogan , Philipp Strack