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We consider a finite-horizon discrete-time dynamic system jointly controlled by a designer and one or more agents, where the designer can influence the agents' actions through selective information disclosure. At each time step, the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-08-04 Renyan Sun , Ashutosh Nayyar

We propose decentralized primal-dual methods for cooperative multi-agent consensus optimization problems over both static and time-varying communication networks, where only local communications are allowed. The objective is to minimize the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-02-23 Erfan Yazdandoost Hamedani , Necdet Serhat Aybat

In this work we investigate the inefficiency of the electricity system with strategic agents. Specifically, we prove that without a proper control the total demand of an inefficient system is at most twice the total demand of the optimal…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2015-09-10 Carlos Barreto , Eduardo Mojica-Nava , Nicanor Quijano

An agent observes the set of available projects and proposes some, but not necessarily all, of them. A principal chooses one or none from the proposed set. We solve for a mechanism that minimizes the principal's worst-case regret. We…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2023-09-04 Yingni Guo , Eran Shmaya

While traditional game models often simplify interactions among agents as static, real-world social relationships are inherently dynamic, influenced by both immediate payoffs and alternative information. Motivated by this fact, we introduce…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2024-11-25 Hongyu Yue , Xiaojin Xiong , Minyu Feng , Attila Szolnoki

The widespread deployment of Machine Learning systems everywhere raises challenges, such as dealing with interactions or competition between multiple learners. In that goal, we study multi-agent sequential decision-making by considering…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-10-28 Antoine Scheid , Etienne Boursier , Alain Durmus , Eric Moulines , Michael I. Jordan

This paper considers a network of agents, where each agent is assumed to take actions optimally with respect to a predefined payoff function involving the latest actions of the agent's neighbors. Neighborhood relationships stem from payoff…

Dynamical Systems · Mathematics 2021-01-19 Sadegh Arefizadeh , Sadjaad Ozgoli , Sadegh Bolouki , Tamer Başar

We consider reallocation problems in settings where the initial endowment of each agent consists of a subset of the resources. The private information of the players is their value for every possible subset of the resources. The goal is to…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2014-04-29 Liad Blumrosen , Shahar Dobzinski

In this paper, a novel distributed optimization framework has been proposed. The key idea is to convert optimization problems into optimal control problems where the objective of each agent is to design the current control input minimizing…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-04-01 Ziyuan Guo , Yue Sun , Yeming Xu , Liping Zhang , Huanshui Zhang

A set of agents has to make a decision about the provision of a public good and its financing. Agents have heterogeneous values for the public good and each agent's value is private information. An agenda-setter has the right to make a…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-04-16 Giovanni Valvassori Bolgè

The problem of computing near-optimal contracts in combinatorial settings has recently attracted significant interest in the computer science community. Previous work has provided a rich body of structural and algorithmic insights into this…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-06-26 Michal Feldman , Yoav Gal-Tzur , Tomasz Ponitka , Maya Schlesinger

A principal contracts with an agent who sequentially searches over projects to generate a prize. The principal initially knows only one of the agent's available projects and evaluates a contract by its worst-case performance. We…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-09-17 Théo Durandard , Udayan Vaidya , Boli Xu

Game theory serves as a powerful tool for distributed optimization in multi-agent systems in different applications. In this paper we consider multi-agent systems that can be modeled by means of potential games whose potential function…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-04-13 Tatiana Tatarenko

We study how a principal can jointly shape an agent's timing and action through information. We develop a revelation principle: with intertemporal commitment, the problem simplifies to choosing a joint distribution over stopping times and…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-11-26 Andrew Koh , Sivakorn Sanguanmoo , Weijie Zhong

We study a natural application of contract design in the context of sequential exploration problems. In our principal-agent setting, a search task is delegated to an agent. The agent performs a sequential exploration of $n$ boxes, suffers…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-01-27 Martin Hoefer , Conrad Schecker , Kevin Schewior

As AI usage becomes more prevalent in social contexts, understanding agent-user interaction is critical to designing systems that improve both individual and group outcomes. We present an online behavioral experiment (N = 243) in which…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Kehang Zhu , Nithum Thain , Vivian Tsai , James Wexler , Crystal Qian

We consider the design of experiments to evaluate treatments that are administered by self-interested agents, each seeking to achieve the highest evaluation and win the experiment. For example, in an advertising experiment, a company wishes…

Methodology · Statistics 2015-09-18 Panos Toulis , David C. Parkes , Elery Pfeffer , James Zou

In this paper, we consider distributed optimization problems over a multi-agent network, where each agent can only partially evaluate the objective function, and it is allowed to exchange messages with its immediate neighbors. Differently…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-02-22 Davood Hajinezhad , Mingyi Hong , Alfredo Garcia

We evaluate the goal of maximizing the number of individuals matched to acceptable outcomes. We show that it implies incentive, fairness, and implementation impossibilities. Despite that, we present two classes of mechanisms that maximize…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2020-12-03 Mustafa Oğuz Afacan , Inácio Bó , Bertan Turhan

We study a simple problem of allocating common-value goods. The designer seeks to allocate the goods to as many unit-demand agents as possible without monetary transfers, while agents, who possess partial private information about the…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-04-22 Hiroto Sato , Ryo Shirakawa