English
Related papers

Related papers: Information Design in the Principal-Agent Problem

200 papers

We consider a general problem where an agent is in a multi-agent environment and must plan for herself without any prior information about her opponents. At each moment, this pivotal agent is faced with a trade-off between exploiting her…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2025-02-14 Fengming Zhu , Fangzhen Lin

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

Understanding the agent's learning process, particularly the factors that contribute to its success or failure post-training, is crucial for comprehending the rationale behind the agent's decision-making process. Prior methods clarify the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Shuang Ao , Simon Khan , Haris Aziz , Flora D. Salim

This paper proposes a model of decision-making under uncertainty in which an agent is constrained in her cognitive ability to consider complex acts. We identify the complexity of an act according to the corresponding partition of state…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2024-06-27 Yuan Gu , Chao Hung Chan

Open data repositories hold potential for evidence-based decision-making, yet are inaccessible to non-experts lacking expertise in dataset discovery, schema mapping, and statistical analysis. Large language models show promise for…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-11-06 Sina Montazeri , Yunhe Feng , Kewei Sha

We examine problems of ``intermediated implementation,'' in which a single principal can only regulate limited aspects of the consumption bundles traded between intermediaries and agents with hidden characteristics. An example is sales, in…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2020-01-22 Anqi Li , Yiqing Xing

I provide a sufficient condition under which a principal does not benefit from committing to a mechanism in economic models represented by a maximisation problem under constraints. These problems include mechanism design, principal-agent…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-10-10 Nathan Hancart

Reinforcement learning in a multi agent system is difficult because these systems are inherently non-stationary in nature. In such a case, identifying the type of the opposite agent is crucial and can help us address this non-stationary…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2019-12-16 Siddharth Ghiya , Oluwafemi Azeez , Brendan Miller

This paper considers the hidden-action model of the principal-agent problem, in which a principal incentivizes an agent to work on a project using a contract. We investigate whether contracts with bounded payments are learnable and…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-02-23 Yurong Chen , Zhaohua Chen , Xiaotie Deng , Zhiyi Huang

Recent works began to automate the design of agentic systems using meta-agents that propose and iteratively refine new agent architectures. In this paper, we examine three key challenges in a common class of meta-agents. First, we…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-09 Batu El , Mert Yuksekgonul , James Zou

We study information design settings where the designer controls information about a state, and there are multiple agents interacting in a game who are privately informed about their types. Each agent's utility depends on all agents' types…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2022-01-31 Ozan Candogan , Philipp Strack

We present our approach to the problem of how an agent, within an economic Multi-Agent System, can determine when it should behave strategically (i.e. learn and use models of other agents), and when it should act as a simple price-taker. We…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2007-05-23 Jose M. Vidal , Edmund H. Durfee

We consider the problem of decentralized constrained optimization with multiple agents $E_1,\ldots,E_N$ who jointly wish to learn the optimal solution set while keeping their feasible sets $\mathcal{P}_1,\ldots,\mathcal{P}_N$ private from…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Shreya Meel , Sennur Ulukus

An information theoretic privacy mechanism design problem for two scenarios is studied where the private data is either hidden or observable. In each scenario, privacy leakage constraints are considered using two different measures. In…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2022-05-11 Amirreza Zamani , Tobias J. Oechtering , Mikael Skoglund

We study a framework where agents have to avoid aversive signals. The agents are given only partial information, in the form of features that are projections of task states. Additionally, the agents have to cope with non-determinism,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2016-05-17 Tom J. Ameloot

This paper introduces a framework for Planning while Learning where an agent is given a goal to achieve in an environment whose behavior is only partially known to the agent. We discuss the tractability of various plan-design processes. We…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2014-11-17 S. Safra , M. Tennenholtz

Many regulatory and analytic problems require that a prohibited variable influence a decision only through a designated allowable channel -- a conditional-independence requirement that arises in path-specific fairness, the handling of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-19 Zou Yang , Sophia Xiao , Bijan Mazaheri

Across millennia, complex societies have faced the same coordination problem of how to organize collective action among cognitively bounded and informationally incomplete individuals. Different civilizations developed different political…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-01 Chao Fei , Hongcheng Guo , Yanghua Xiao

We study a bilevel \emph{max-max} optimization framework for principal-agent contract design, in which a principal chooses incentives to maximize utility while anticipating the agent's best response. This problem, central to moral hazard…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-27 Tomer Galanti , Aarya Bookseller , Korok Ray

We study incentive design when multiple principals simultaneously design mechanisms for their respective teams in environments with strategic spillovers. In this environment, each principal's set of incentive-compatible mechanisms--those…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-05-11 Brian Roberson