Related papers: Incentivizing Hidden Types in Secretary Problem
We consider two variants of the secretary problem, the\emph{ Best-or-Worst} and the \emph{Postdoc} problems, which are closely related. First, we prove that both variants, in their standard form with binary payoff 1 or 0, share the same…
We study a signaling game between two firms competing to have their product chosen by a principal. The products have qualities drawn i.i.d. from a common prior. The principal aims to choose the better product, but the quality of a product…
We study how to incentivize agents in a target group to produce a higher output in the context of incomplete information, by means of rank-order allocation contests. We describe a symmetric Bayes--Nash equilibrium for contests that have two…
A benevolent advisor observes a project's complexity and posts a pass - fail threshold before the agent chooses effort. The project succeeds only if ability and effort together clear complexity. We compare two informational regimes. In the…
In an adversarial environment, a hostile player performing a task may behave like a non-hostile one in order not to reveal its identity to an opponent. To model such a scenario, we define identity concealment games: zero-sum stochastic…
We study a variation of the game of best choice (also known as the secretary problem or game of googol) under an additional assumption that the ranks of interview candidates are restricted using permutation pattern-avoidance. We describe…
We study reward design strategies for incentivizing a reinforcement learning agent to adopt a policy from a set of admissible policies. The goal of the reward designer is to modify the underlying reward function cost-efficiently while…
We formulate a mean field game where each player stops a privately observed Brownian motion with absorption. Players are ranked according to their level of stopping and rewarded as a function of their relative rank. There is a unique mean…
We demonstrate that the set of cost distributions under which the optimal strategy for maximizing compliance (or more generally, effort) in a binary choice environment is identical to the optimal strategy for maximizing the accuracy of the…
We investigate the mechanism design problem faced by a principal who hires \emph{multiple} agents to gather and report costly information. Then, the principal exploits the information to make an informed decision. We model this problem as a…
We consider active learning under incentive compatibility constraints. The main application of our results is to economic experiments, in which a learner seeks to infer the parameters of a subject's preferences: for example their attitudes…
Federated learning promises significant sample-efficiency gains by pooling data across multiple agents, yet incentive misalignment is an obstacle: each update is costly to the contributor but boosts every participant. We introduce a…
Meritocratic systems, from admissions to hiring, aim to impartially reward skill and effort. Yet persistent disparities across race, gender, and class challenge this ideal. Some attribute these gaps to structural inequality; others to…
Winners-take-all situations introduce an incentive for agents to diversify their behavior, since doing so will result in splitting an eventual price with fewer people. At the same time, when the payoff of a process depends on a parameter…
The game of best choice (also known as the secretary problem) is a model for sequential decision making with a long history and many variations. The classical setup assumes that the sequence of candidate rankings are uniformly distributed.…
We study $n$-dimensional contests between two players with heterogeneous effort costs, where each dimension (battle) is modeled as a Tullock contest. Prize-allocation rules are identity-independent, budget-balanced, and weakly increasing in…
We study a setting in which a principal selects an agent to execute a collection of tasks according to a specified priority sequence. Agents, however, have their own individual priority sequences according to which they wish to execute the…
As a famous result, the ``37\% Law'' for Secretary Problem has widely influenced peoples' perception on online decision strategies about choice. However, using this strategy, too many attractive candidates may be rejected in the first 37\%,…
In the secretary problem we are faced with an online sequence of elements with values. Upon seeing an element we have to make an irrevocable take-it-or-leave-it decision. The goal is to maximize the probability of picking the element of…
In competitive resource allocation, a central coordinator may seek to gain an advantage not by directly controlling subordinate agents, but by strategically manipulating the information they receive. We study this problem within the…