Related papers: Discovery through Trial Balloons
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…
We explore a multiple-stage variant of the min-max robust selection problem with budgeted uncertainty that includes queries. First, one queries a subset of items and gets the exact values of their uncertain parameters. Given this…
A principal designs an algorithm that generates a publicly observable prediction of a binary state. She must decide whether to act directly based on the prediction or to delegate the decision to an agent with private information but…
We examine the strategic interaction between an expert (principal) maximizing engagement and an agent seeking swift information. Our analysis reveals: When priors align, relative patience determines optimal disclosure -- impatient agents…
Lotteries are commonly employed in school choice to fairly resolve priority ties; however, current practices typically keep students uninformed about their lottery outcomes at the time of preference submission. This paper advocates for…
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…
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…
How to find unknown distributions is questioned in many pieces of research. There are several ways to figure them out, but the main question is which acts more reasonably than others. In this paper, we focus on the maximum entropy principle…
This paper studies a search problem where a consumer is initially aware of only a few products. At every point in time, the consumer then decides between searching among alternatives he is already aware of and discovering more products. I…
We explore the deliberate infusion of ambiguity into the design of contracts. We show that when the agent is ambiguity-averse and hence chooses an action that maximizes their minimum utility, the principal can strictly gain from using an…
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…
We investigate the problem of a principal looking to contract an expert to provide a probability forecast for a categorical event. We assume all experts have a common public prior on the event's probability, but can form more accurate…
In bipartite matching problems, agents on two sides of a graph want to be paired according to their preferences. The stability of a matching depends on these preferences, which in uncertain environments also reflect agents' beliefs about…
We study optimal dynamic persuasion in a bandit experimentation model where a principal, unlike in standard settings, has a single-peaked preference over the agent's stopping time. This non-monotonic preference arises because maximizing the…
In the classical principal-agent hidden-action contract model, a principal delegates the execution of a costly task to an agent. In order to complete the task, the agent chooses an action from a set of actions, where each potential action…
We consider the mechanism design problem of a principal allocating a single good to one of several agents without monetary transfers. Each agent desires the good and uses it to create value for the principal. We designate this value as the…
A monopolist wishes to maximize her profits by finding an optimal price policy. After she announces a menu of products and prices, each agent $x$ will choose to buy that product $y(x)$ which maximizes his own utility, if positive. The…
We study the problem of designing voting rules that take as input the ordinal preferences of $n$ agents over a set of $m$ alternatives and output a single alternative, aiming to optimize the overall happiness of the agents. The input to the…
We study a variant of the principal-agent problem in which the principal does not directly observe the agent's effort outcome; rather, she gets a signal about the agent's action according to a variable information structure designed by a…
It is common in recommendation systems that users both consume and produce information as they make strategic choices under uncertainty. While a social planner would balance "exploration" and "exploitation" using a multi-armed bandit…