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Negotiation is a very common interaction between automated agents. Many common negotiation protocols work with cardinal utilities, even though ordinal preferences, which only rank the outcomes, are easier to elicit from humans. In this work…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-12-18 Sefi Erlich , Noam Hazon , Sarit Kraus

We consider stopping problems in which a decision maker (DM) faces an unknown state of nature and decides sequentially whether to stop and take an irreversible action; pay a fee and obtain additional information; or wait without acquiring…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2022-05-16 Ehud Lehrer , Tao Wang

We consider the bilateral trade problem, in which two agents trade a single indivisible item. It is known that the only dominant-strategy truthful mechanism is the fixed-price mechanism: given commonly known distributions of the buyer's…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2021-12-21 Zi Yang Kang , Francisco Pernice , Jan Vondrák

Online platforms in the Internet Economy commonly incorporate recommender systems that recommend products (or "arms") to users (or "agents"). A key challenge in this domain arises from myopic agents who are naturally incentivized to exploit…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2024-06-19 Xiaowu Dai , Wenlu Xu , Yuan Qi , Michael I. Jordan

Many-to-many matching with contracts is studied in the framework of revealed preferences. All preferences are described by choice functions that satisfy natural conditions. Under a no-externality assumption individual preferences can be…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2020-03-05 Daniel Lehmann

The question we raise through this paper is: Is it economically feasible to trade consumer personal information with their formal consent (permission) and in return provide them incentives (monetary or otherwise)?. In view of (a) the…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2020-12-11 Ranjan Pal , Yixuan Wang , Swades De , Bodhibrata Nag , Pan Hui

We study optimal dynamic persuasion in a bandit experimentation model where a principal, unlike in standard settings, has a single-peaked preference over the agent's stopping time. This non-monotonic preference arises because maximizing the…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-03-24 Zhuo Chen , Yun Liu

We develop a mixed control framework that combines absolutely continuous controls with impulse interventions subject to stochastic execution delays. The model extends current impulse control formulations by allowing (i) the controller to…

Trading and Market Microstructure · Quantitative Finance 2026-02-20 Philippe Bergault , Yadh Hafsi , Leandro Sánchez-Betancourt

We study the problem of a principal who wants to influence an agent's observable action, subject to an ex-post budget. The agent has a private type determining their cost function. This paper endogenizes the value of the resource driving…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2024-04-25 Nicole Immorlica , Nicholas Wu , Brendan Lucier

This paper studies the provision of incentives for information acquisition. Information is costly for an agent to acquire and unobservable to a principal. We show that any Pareto optimal contract has a decomposition into a fraction of…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2021-03-09 Aubrey Clark , Giovanni Reggiani

We examine the strategic interaction between an expert (principal) maximizing engagement and an agent seeking swift information. Our analysis reveals: When priors align, relative patience determines optimal disclosure -- impatient agents…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2024-07-30 Maryam Saeedi , Yikang Shen , Ali Shourideh

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…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2019-11-22 Anqi Li , Ming Yang

We study the network pricing problem where the leader maximizes their revenue by determining the optimal amounts of tolls to charge on a set of arcs, under the assumption that the followers will react rationally and choose the shortest…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-04-01 Quang Minh Bui , Bernard Gendron , Margarida Carvalho

We study a decision-maker's problem of finding optimal monetary incentive schemes for retention when faced with agents whose participation decisions (stochastically) depend on the incentive they receive. Our focus is on policies constrained…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-07-31 Daniel Freund , Chamsi Hssaine

This paper proposes a method to design an optimal dynamic contract between a principal and an agent, who has the authority to control both the principal's revenue and an engineered system. The key characteristic of our problem setting is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2014-03-24 Insoon Yang , Duncan S. Callaway , Claire J. Tomlin

An agent acquires a costly flexible signal before making a decision. We explore to what degree knowledge of the agent's information costs helps predict her behavior. We establish an impossibility result: learning costs alone generate no…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2023-04-05 Elliot Lipnowski , Doron Ravid

In multi-agent reinforcement learning systems, the actions of one agent can have a negative impact on the rewards of other agents. One way to combat this problem is to let agents trade their rewards amongst each other. Motivated by this,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-07-25 Michael Kölle , Lennart Rietdorf , Kyrill Schmid

This article studies the problem of evaluating the information that a Principal lacks when establishing an incentive contract with an Agent whose effort is not observable. The Principal ("she") pays a continuous rent to the Agent ("he"),…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-04-10 Ishak Hajjej , Caroline Hillairet , Mohamed Mnif

We study the optimal design of electricity contracts among a population of consumers with different needs. This question is tackled within the framework of Principal-Agent problems in presence of adverse selection. The particular features…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-09-17 Clémence Alasseur , Ivar Ekeland , Romuald Elie , Nicolás Hernández Santibáñez , Dylan Possamaï

We study the excludable public project model where the decision is binary (build or not build). In a classic excludable and binary public project model, an agent either consumes the project in its whole or is completely excluded. We study a…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-05-22 Mingyu Guo , Diksha Goel , Guanhua Wang , Yong Yang , Muhammad Ali Babar