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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

In this paper, we consider the problem of a Principal aiming at designing a reward function for a population of heterogeneous agents. We construct an incentive based on the ranking of the agents, so that a competition among the latter is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-28 Clémence Alasseur , Erhan Bayraktar , Roxana Dumitrescu , Quentin Jacquet

In a decision-making scenario, a principal could use conditional predictions from an expert agent to inform their choice. However, this approach would introduce a fundamental conflict of interest. An agent optimizing for predictive accuracy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-12-31 Rubi Hudson

We study a dynamic model of Bayesian persuasion in sequential decision-making settings. An informed principal observes an external parameter of the world and advises an uninformed agent about actions to take over time. The agent takes…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-05-25 Jiarui Gan , Rupak Majumdar , Goran Radanovic , Adish Singla

We consider a number of questions related to tradeoffs between reward and regret in repeated gameplay between two agents. To facilitate this, we introduce a notion of $\textit{generalized equilibrium}$ which allows for asymmetric regret…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-12-19 William Brown , Jon Schneider , Kiran Vodrahalli

We study how to optimally design selection mechanisms, accounting for agents' investment incentives. A principal wishes to allocate a resource of homogeneous quality to a heterogeneous population of agents. The principal commits to a…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-11-11 Victor Augias , Eduardo Perez-Richet

We study preference learning through recommendations in multi-agent game settings, where a moderator repeatedly interacts with agents whose utility functions are unknown. In each round, the moderator issues action recommendations and…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Arwa Alanqary , Zakaria Baba , Manxi Wu , Alexandre M. Bayen

Reinforcement Learning agents are expected to eventually perform well. Typically, this takes the form of a guarantee about the asymptotic behavior of an algorithm given some assumptions about the environment. We present an algorithm for a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-04-02 Michael K. Cohen , Elliot Catt , Marcus Hutter

Game-theoretic inverse learning is the problem of inferring a player's objectives from their actions. We formulate an inverse learning problem in a Stackelberg game between a leader and a follower, where each player's action is the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-10-15 William Ward , Yue Yu , Jacob Levy , Negar Mehr , David Fridovich-Keil , Ufuk Topcu

We consider a data analyst's problem of purchasing data from strategic agents to compute an unbiased estimate of a statistic of interest. Agents incur private costs to reveal their data and the costs can be arbitrarily correlated with their…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2018-09-06 Yiling Chen , Nicole Immorlica , Brendan Lucier , Vasilis Syrgkanis , Juba Ziani

A Stackelberg game is played between a leader and a follower. The leader first chooses an action, then the follower plays his best response. The goal of the leader is to pick the action that will maximize his payoff given the follower's…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2015-11-19 Aaron Roth , Jonathan Ullman , Zhiwei Steven Wu

The hidden-action model captures a fundamental problem of principal-agent theory and provides an optimal sharing rule when only the outcome but not the effort can be observed. However, the hidden-action model builds on various explicit and…

General Economics · Economics 2020-04-15 Stephan Leitner , Friederike Wall

Learning to bid in repeated first-price auctions is a fundamental problem at the interface of game theory and machine learning, which has seen a recent surge in interest due to the transition of display advertising to first-price auctions.…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-07-09 Rachitesh Kumar , Jon Schneider , Balasubramanian Sivan

Inverse Reinforcement Learning addresses the problem of inferring an expert's reward function from demonstrations. However, in many applications, we not only have access to the expert's near-optimal behavior, but we also observe part of her…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-03 Giorgia Ramponi , Gianluca Drappo , Marcello Restelli

In a Stackelberg game, a leader commits to a randomized strategy, and a follower chooses their best strategy in response. We consider an extension of a standard Stackelberg game, called a discrete-time dynamic Stackelberg game, that has an…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-02-11 Niklas Lauffer , Mahsa Ghasemi , Abolfazl Hashemi , Yagiz Savas , Ufuk Topcu

In many sequential decision making tasks, it is challenging to design reward functions that help an RL agent efficiently learn behavior that is considered good by the agent designer. A number of different formulations of the reward-design…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-06-25 Zeyu Zheng , Junhyuk Oh , Satinder Singh

When multiple informative equilibria are possible in a general cheap talk game, how much information can a principal guarantee herself? To answer this question, I define the notion of worst-case implementation-implementation via the worst…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-02-17 Andrei Iakovlev

Algorithmic decision-making in high-stakes domains often involves assigning decisions to agents with incentives to strategically modify their input to the algorithm. In addition to dealing with incentives, in many domains of interest (e.g.…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-10-31 Keegan Harris , Chara Podimata , Zhiwei Steven Wu

This exercise proposes a learning mechanism to model economic agent's decision-making process using an actor-critic structure in the literature of artificial intelligence. It is motivated by the psychology literature of learning through…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2022-02-21 Rui , Shi

Strategic classification studies the problem where self-interested individuals or agents manipulate their response to obtain favorable decision outcomes made by classifiers, typically turning to dishonest actions when they are less costly…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-26 Ziyuan Huang , Lina Alkarmi , Mingyan Liu