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Related papers: Delegated Pandora's box

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The Pandora's Box Problem, originally formalized by Weitzman in 1979, models selection from set of random, alternative options, when evaluation is costly. This includes, for example, the problem of hiring a skilled worker, where only one…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-02-20 Shant Boodaghians , Federico Fusco , Philip Lazos , Stefano Leonardi

Principal-agent problems arise when one party acts on behalf of another, leading to conflicts of interest. The economic literature has extensively studied principal-agent problems, and recent work has extended this to more complex scenarios…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-01-02 Omer Ben-Porat , Yishay Mansour , Michal Moshkovitz , Boaz Taitler

Martin Weitzman's "Pandora's problem" furnishes the mathematical basis for optimal search theory in economics. Nearly 40 years later, Laura Doval introduced a version of the problem in which the searcher is not obligated to pay the cost of…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2019-05-07 Hedyeh Beyhaghi , Robert Kleinberg

We study a robust contract design problem with deferred inspection, in which a principal allocates a scarce resource to an agent, observes the agent's realized outcome ex post at negligible cost, and conditions transfers on this information…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-01-12 Halil I. Bayrak , Martin Bichler

The hidden-action model captures a fundamental problem of principal-agent theory and provides an optimal sharing rule when only the outcome but not the effort can be observed. However, the hidden-action model builds on various explicit and…

General Economics · Economics 2020-04-15 Stephan Leitner , Friederike Wall

Constrained submodular set function maximization problems often appear in multi-agent decision-making problems with a discrete feasible set. A prominent example is the problem of multi-agent mobile sensor placement over a discrete domain.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-08-02 Navid Rezazadeh , Solmaz S. Kia

A principal must allocate a set of heterogeneous tasks (or objects) among multiple agents. The principal has preferences over the allocation. Each agent has preferences over which tasks they are assigned, which are their private…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-01-29 Quitzé Valenzuela-Stookey

In this paper, a class of convex feasibility problems (CFPs) are studied for multi-agent systems through local interactions. The objective is to search a feasible solution to the convex inequalities with some set constraints in a…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2016-12-16 Kaihong Lu , Gangshan Jing , Long Wang

A designer relies on an experimenter to provide information to a decision maker, but the experimenter has incentives to persuade rather than merely transmit information. Anticipating this motive, the designer can restrict the set of…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-05-05 Francesco Bilotta , Christoph Carnehl , Justus Preusser

Distributed Constraint Optimization (DCOP) is a powerful framework for representing and solving distributed combinatorial problems, where the variables of the problem are owned by different agents. Many multi-agent problems include…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2014-02-05 Tal Grinshpoun , Alon Grubshtein , Roie Zivan , Arnon Netzer , Amnon Meisels

This paper revisits the classic Pandora's box problem, studying a decision-maker (DM) who seeks to minimize her maximal ex-post regret. The DM decides how many options to explore and in what order, before choosing one or taking an outside…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-12-25 Sarah Auster , Yeon-Koo Che

When should we delegate decisions to AI systems? While the value alignment literature has developed techniques for shaping AI values, less attention has been paid to how to determine, under uncertainty, when imperfect alignment is good…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Daniel A. Herrmann , Abinav Chari , Isabelle Qian , Sree Sharvesh , B. A. Levinstein

The Distributed Constraint Optimization Problem (DCOP) formulation is a powerful tool to model multi-agent coordination problems that are distributed by nature. The formulation is suitable for problems where variables are discrete and…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2020-05-28 Khoi D. Hoang , William Yeoh , Makoto Yokoo , Zinovi Rabinovich

We study the problem of constrained distributed optimization in multi-agent networks when some of the computing agents may be faulty. In this problem, the system goal is to have all the non-faulty agents collectively minimize a global…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2015-11-06 Lili Su , Nitin H. Vaidya

Multi-agent planning in stochastic environments can be framed formally as a decentralized Markov decision problem. Many real-life distributed problems that arise in manufacturing, multi-robot coordination and information gathering scenarios…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2011-11-02 Claudia V. Goldman , Shlomo Zilberstein

The paper addresses large-scale, convex optimization problems that need to be solved in a distributed way by agents communicating according to a random time-varying graph. Specifically, the goal of the network is to minimize the sum of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-10-28 Andrea Camisa , Francesco Farina , Ivano Notarnicola , Giuseppe Notarstefano

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

In this paper we consider a distributed optimization scenario in which a set of agents has to solve a convex optimization problem with separable cost function, local constraint sets and a coupling inequality constraint. We propose a novel…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2018-04-25 Ivano Notarnicola , Giuseppe Notarstefano

In this paper, we present a distributed algorithm for solving convex, constraint-coupled, optimization problems over peer-to-peer networks. We consider a network of processors that aim to cooperatively minimize the sum of local cost…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-04-14 Andrea Camisa , Alessia Benevento , Giuseppe Notarstefano

As AI technologies improve, people are increasingly willing to delegate tasks to AI agents. In many cases, the human decision-maker chooses whether to delegate to an AI agent based on properties of the specific instance of the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Sophie Greenwood , Karen Levy , Solon Barocas , Hoda Heidari , Jon Kleinberg