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We consider the problem of maximizing revenue for a monopolist offering multiple items to multiple heterogeneous buyers. We develop a simple mechanism that obtains a constant factor approximation under the assumption that the buyers' values…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2016-08-10 Shuchi Chawla , J. Benjamin Miller

We study a multi-agent contract design problem with moral hazard. In our model, each agent exerts costly effort towards an individual task at which it may either succeed or fail, and the principal, who wishes to encourage effort, has an…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-07-09 Sumit Goel , Wade Hann-Caruthers

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) to aggregate multiple preferences has attracted considerable research attention. With aggregation algorithms advancing, a potential economic scenario arises where fine-tuning services are provided to…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Haoran Sun , Yurong Chen , Siwei Wang , Xu Chu , Wei Chen , Xiaotie Deng

Solving tasks with sparse rewards is one of the most important challenges in reinforcement learning. In the single-agent setting, this challenge is addressed by introducing intrinsic rewards that motivate agents to explore unseen regions of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-05-25 Shariq Iqbal , Fei Sha

In this work, we study the problem of finding Pareto optimal policies in multi-agent reinforcement learning problems with cooperative reward structures. We show that any algorithm where each agent only optimizes their reward is subject to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-10-28 Bang Giang Le , Viet Cuong Ta

We study the problem of cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning with a single joint reward signal. This class of learning problems is difficult because of the often large combined action and observation spaces. In the fully…

A large fraction of total healthcare expenditure occurs due to end-of-life (EOL) care, which means it is important to study the problem of more carefully incentivizing necessary versus unnecessary EOL care because this has the potential to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-03-25 Muyan Jiang , Ying Chen , Xin Chen , Javad Lavaei , Anil Aswani

Reward design is a critical part of the application of reinforcement learning, the performance of which strongly depends on how well the reward signal frames the goal of the designer and how well the signal assesses progress in reaching…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-01 Yixiang Wang , Yujing Hu , Feng Wu , Yingfeng Chen

Modeling the preferences of agents over a set of alternatives is a principal concern in many areas. The dominant approach has been to find a single reward/utility function with the property that alternatives yielding higher rewards are…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-09 Alihan Hüyük , William R. Zame , Mihaela van der Schaar

This work studies the online contract design problem. The principal's goal is to learn the optimal contract that maximizes her utility through repeated interactions, without prior knowledge of the agent's type (i.e., the agent's cost and…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Shiliang Zuo

In this paper, we address three Principal--Agent problems in a moral hazard context and show that they are connected. We start by studying the problem of Principal with multiple Agents in cooperation. The term cooperation is manifested here…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-10-23 Mao Fabrice Djete

We study hidden-action principal-agent problems with multiple agents. Unlike previous work, we consider a general setting in which each agent has an arbitrary number of actions, and the joint action induces outcomes according to an…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-02-22 Federico Cacciamani , Martino Bernasconi , Matteo Castiglioni , Nicola Gatti

We propose a multi-agent distributed reinforcement learning algorithm that balances between potentially conflicting short-term reward and sparse, delayed long-term reward, and learns with partial information in a dynamic environment. We…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-04-06 Jing Tan , Ramin Khalili , Holger Karl

We investigate an algorithm that assigns to any game in normal form an approximating game that admits an ordinal potential function. Due to the properties of potential games, the algorithm equips every game with a surrogate reward structure…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Philipp Lakheshar , Sharwin Rezagholi

We study a discrete fair division problem where $n$ agents have additive valuation functions over a set of $m$ goods. We focus on the well-known $\alpha$-EFX fairness criterion, according to which the envy of an agent for another agent is…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Aris Filos-Ratsikas , Georgios Kalantzis , Alexandros A. Voudouris

We study the reward-free reinforcement learning framework, which is particularly suitable for batch reinforcement learning and scenarios where one needs policies for multiple reward functions. This framework has two phases. In the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-26 Zihan Zhang , Simon S. Du , Xiangyang Ji

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

We study a two-period moral hazard problem; there are two agents, with action sets that are unknown to the principal. The principal contracts with each agent sequentially, and seeks to maximize the worst-case discounted sum of payoffs,…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2024-02-15 Chang Liu

In reinforcement learning (RL), different reward functions can define the same optimal policy but result in drastically different learning performance. For some, the agent gets stuck with a suboptimal behavior, and for others, it solves the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-25 Grigorii Veviurko , Wendelin Böhmer , Mathijs de Weerdt

This work studies multi-agent sharing optimization problems with the objective function being the sum of smooth local functions plus a convex (possibly non-smooth) function coupling all agents. This scenario arises in many machine learning…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-06-17 Sulaiman A. Alghunaim , Ming Yan , Ali H. Sayed