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Related papers: Optimal Delegation in a Multidimensional World

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We study hidden-action principal-agent problems with multiple agents. These are problems in which a principal commits to an outcome-dependent payment scheme in order to incentivize some agents to take costly, unobservable actions that lead…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-02-01 Matteo Castiglioni , Alberto Marchesi , Nicola Gatti

We characterize the optimal reward functions (scoring rules) that incentivize an agent to acquire information and report it truthfully to the principal. The optimal scoring rules let the agent make a simple binary bet in single-dimensional…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Jason D. Hartline , Yingkai Li , Liren Shan , Yifan Wu

We study the problem of designing an optimal sequence of incentives that a principal should offer to an agent so that the agent's optimal behavior under the incentives realizes the principal's objective expressed as a temporal logic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-03-20 Yagiz Savas , Vijay Gupta , Melkior Ornik , Lillian J. Ratliff , Ufuk Topcu

I study a principal-agent model in which a principal hires an agent to collect information about an unknown continuous state. The agent acquires a signal whose distribution is centered around the state, controlling the signal's precision at…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-05-05 Fan Wu

A principal uses payments conditioned on stochastic outcomes of a team project to elicit costly effort from the team members. We develop a multi-agent generalization of a classic first-order approach to contract optimization by leveraging…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-03-13 Krishna Dasaratha , Benjamin Golub , Anant Shah

We study delegated Bayesian persuasion: a principal incentivizes an intermediary to design information via outcome-contingent transfers, while the intermediary privately chooses the experiment subject to convex costs. We characterize…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-04-27 Wilfried Youmbi Fotso , Xun Chen

We study Bayesian automated mechanism design in unstructured dynamic environments, where a principal repeatedly interacts with an agent, and takes actions based on the strategic agent's report of the current state of the world. Both the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2021-05-14 Hanrui Zhang , Vincent Conitzer

A principal contracts with an agent through an informed delegate. Although the principal cannot directly mediate the interaction, she can restrict the menus of contracts the delegate may offer. We characterize the outcomes implementable…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-05-22 João Thereze , Udayan Vaidya

A principal who values an object allocates it to one or more agents. Agents learn private information (signals) from an information designer about the allocation payoff to the principal. Monetary transfer is not available but the principal…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2022-10-31 Yi-Chun Chen , Gaoji Hu , Xiangqian Yang

When machine learning is outsourced to a rational agent, conflicts of interest might arise and severely impact predictive performance. In this work, we propose a theoretical framework for incentive-aware delegation of machine learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-07 Eden Saig , Inbal Talgam-Cohen , Nir Rosenfeld

This work considers a repeated principal-agent bandit game, where the principal can only interact with her environment through the agent. The principal and the agent have misaligned objectives and the choice of action is only left to the…

We consider revenue-optimal mechanism design in the interdimensional setting, where one dimension is the 'value' of the buyer, and one is a 'type' that captures some auxiliary information. One setting is the FedEx Problem, for which FGKK…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2020-02-18 Nikhil Devanur , Kira Goldner , Raghuvansh Saxena , Ariel Schvartzman , S. Matthew Weinberg

This work studies a dynamic mechanism design problem in which a principal delegates decision makings to a group of privately-informed agents without the monetary transfer or burning. We consider that the principal privately possesses…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-01-19 Tao Zhang , Quanyan Zhu

Models of economic decision makers often include idealized assumptions, such as rationality, perfect foresight, and access to all relevant pieces of information. These assumptions often assure the models' internal validity, but, at the same…

General Economics · Economics 2021-07-09 Patrick Reinwald , Stephan Leitner , Friederike Wall

When multiple informative equilibria are possible in a general cheap talk game, how much information can a principal guarantee herself? To answer this question, I define the notion of worst-case implementation-implementation via the worst…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-02-17 Andrei Iakovlev

We study how to optimally design selection mechanisms, accounting for agents' investment incentives. A principal wishes to allocate a resource of homogeneous quality to a heterogeneous population of agents. The principal commits to a…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-11-11 Victor Augias , Eduardo Perez-Richet

How should an agent (the sender) observing multi-dimensional data (the state vector) persuade another agent to take the desired action? We show that it is always optimal for the sender to perform a (non-linear) dimension reduction by…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-10-05 Semyon Malamud , Andreas Schrimpf

In the context of humans operating with artificial or autonomous agents in a hybrid team, it is essential to accurately identify when to authorize those team members to perform actions. Given past examples where humans and autonomous…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-10-12 Andrew Fuchs , Andrea Passarella , Marco Conti

In a multi-party machine learning system, different parties cooperate on optimizing towards better models by sharing data in a privacy-preserving way. A major challenge in learning is the incentive issue. For example, if there is…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2020-08-11 Mengjing Chen , Yang Liu , Weiran Shen , Yiheng Shen , Pingzhong Tang , Qiang Yang

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