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We introduce a new model of combinatorial contracts in which a principal delegates the execution of a costly task to an agent. To complete the task, the agent can take any subset of a given set of unobservable actions, each of which has an…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Paul Duetting , Tomer Ezra , Michal Feldman , Thomas Kesselheim

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 introduce and study the persuasive calibration problem, where a principal aims to provide trustworthy predictions about underlying events to a downstream agent to make desired decisions. We adopt the standard calibration framework that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-04-07 Yiding Feng , Wei Tang

Consider a multi-agent systems setup in which a principal (a supervisor agent) assigns subtasks to specialized agents and aggregates their responses into a single system-level output. A core property of such systems is information…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Paulius Rauba , Simonas Cepenas , Mihaela van der Schaar

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 this paper, we consider the revealed preferences problem from a learning perspective. Every day, a price vector and a budget is drawn from an unknown distribution, and a rational agent buys his most preferred bundle according to some…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2012-11-20 Morteza Zadimoghaddam , Aaron Roth

We consider multi-agent systems where agents' preferences are aggregated via sequential majority voting: each decision is taken by performing a sequence of pairwise comparisons where each comparison is a weighted majority vote among the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2012-04-18 Maria Pini , Francesca Rossi , Brent Venable , Toby Walsh

We introduce a stochastic principal-agent model. A principal and an agent interact in a stochastic environment, each privy to observations about the state not available to the other. The principal has the power of commitment, both to elicit…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-09-13 Jiarui Gan , Rupak Majumdar , Debmalya Mandal , Goran Radanovic

We consider Incentive Decision Processes, where a principal seeks to reduce its costs due to another agent's behavior, by offering incentives to the agent for alternate behavior. We focus on the case where a principal interacts with a…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2012-10-19 Sashank J. Reddi , Emma Brunskill

We consider moral hazard problems where a principal has access to rich monitoring data about an agent's action. Rather than focusing on optimal contracts (which are known to in general be complicated), we characterize the optimal rate at…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2024-07-04 Mira Frick , Ryota Iijima , Yuhta Ishii

Optimization is offered as an objective approach to resolving complex, real-world decisions involving uncertainty and conflicting interests. It drives business strategies as well as public policies and, increasingly, lies at the heart of…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-08-01 Benjamin Laufer , Thomas Krendl Gilbert , Helen Nissenbaum

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 propose a new principal-agent framework where a principal communicates a roadmap -- a set of plausible outcome models and a prior belief over them -- to guide an agent who is learning the value of innovation. The agent trusts the prior…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-02-24 Florian Mudekereza

The emergent behavior of a distributed system is conditioned by the information available to the local decision-makers. Therefore, one may expect that providing decision-makers with more information will improve system performance; in this…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-06-23 Bryce L. Ferguson , Dario Paccagnan , Jason R. Marden

In practice, incentive providers (i.e., principals) often cannot observe the reward realizations of incentivized agents, which is in contrast to many principal-agent models that have been previously studied. This information asymmetry…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-15 Ilgin Dogan , Zuo-Jun Max Shen , Anil Aswani

In this paper, we study axiomatic foundations of Bayesian persuasion, where a principal (i.e., sender) delegates the task of choice making after informing a biased agent (i.e., receiver) about the payoff relevant uncertain state (see, e.g.,…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-12-30 Youichiro Higashi , Kemal Ozbek , Norio Takeoka

Meta-training agents with memory has been shown to culminate in Bayes-optimal agents, which casts Bayes-optimality as the implicit solution to a numerical optimization problem rather than an explicit modeling assumption. Bayes-optimal…

We prove an existence result for the principal-agent problem with adverse selection under general assumptions on preferences and allocation spaces. Instead of assuming that the allocation space is finite-dimensional or compact, we consider…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-03-11 Guillaume Carlier , Kelvin Shuangjian Zhang

In this paper, we consider an adversarial scenario where one agent seeks to achieve an objective and its adversary seeks to learn the agent's intentions and prevent the agent from achieving its objective. The agent has an incentive to try…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-05-09 Melkior Ornik , Ufuk Topcu

We consider a social planner faced with a stream of myopic selfish agents. The goal of the social planner is to maximize the social welfare, however, it is limited to using only information asymmetry (regarding previous outcomes) and cannot…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2019-05-15 Lee Cohen , Yishay Mansour