Related papers: Should the Timing of Inspections be Predictable?
We consider an active visual exploration scenario, where an agent must intelligently select its camera motions to efficiently reconstruct the full environment from only a limited set of narrow field-of-view glimpses. While the agent has…
In this paper a multi-component system is studied where each component can be repaired within the system. We consider that each component is subject to two dependent competing failure processes due to degradation and random shocks and each…
As frontier language models are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents pursuing complex, long-term objectives, there is increased risk of scheming: agents covertly pursuing misaligned goals. Prior work has focused on showing agents are…
This paper studies continuous-time optimal contracting in a hierarchy problem which generalises the model of Sung (2015). The hierarchy is modeled by a series of interlinked principal-agent problems, leading to a sequence of Stackelberg…
In order to ensure the robust actuation of a plan, execution must be adaptable to unexpected situations in the world and to exogenous events. This is critical in domains in which committing to a wrong ordering of actions can cause the plan…
The hidden-action model provides an optimal sharing rule for situations in which a principal assigns a task to an agent who makes an effort to carry out the task assigned to him. However, the principal can only observe the task outcome but…
Suppose you run a home exam, where students should report their own scores but can cheat freely. You can, if needed, call a limited number of students to class and verify their actual performance against their reported score. We consider…
I study whether and which expert incentives can be provided at what cost when the states of the world become non-contractible, but there is some noisy observation about the states that can be contracted upon. A principal hires an agent to…
A principal delegates decisions to a biased agent. Payoffs depend on a state that the principal cannot observe. Initially, the agent does not observe the state, but he can acquire information about it at a cost. We characterize the…
We study a sequential resource allocation problem involving a fixed number of recurring jobs. At each time-step the manager should distribute available resources among the jobs in order to maximise the expected number of completed jobs.…
Consider the relationship between a regulator (the principal) and an experimenter (the agent) such as a pharmaceutical company. The pharmaceutical company wishes to sell a drug for profit, whereas the regulator wishes to allow only…
Is transparency always beneficial in complex systems such as traffic networks and stock markets? How is transparency defined in multi-agent systems, and what is its optimal degree at which social welfare is highest? We take an agent-based…
This paper studies the design of optimal proper scoring rules when the principal has partial knowledge of an agent's signal distribution. Recent work characterizes the proper scoring rules that maximize the increase of an agent's payoff…
Does electoral replacement ensure that officeholders eventually act in voters' interests? We study a reputational model of accountability. Voters observe incumbents' performance and decide whether to replace them. Politicians may be "good"…
We consider how local and global decision policies interact in stopping time problems such as quickest time change detection. Individual agents make myopic local decisions via social learning, that is, each agent records a private…
We study how to allocate resources to participants who can strategically misrepresent their deservingness at a cost. A principal assigns item(s) (or money) among multiple agents on the basis of their costly signals. Each agent's signal…
We propose an incentive scheme based on intervention to sustain cooperation among self-interested users. In the proposed scheme, an intervention device collects imperfect signals about the actions of the users for a test period, and then…
Strategic behaviour is one of the main explanations for cost overruns. It can theoretically be supported by agency theory, in which strategic behaviour is the result of asymmetric information between the principal and agent. This paper…
We consider sequential search by an agent who cannot observe the quality of goods but can acquire information by buying signals from a profit-maximizing principal with limited commitment power. The principal can charge higher prices for…
We study a generic principal-agent problem in continuous time on a finite time horizon. We introduce a framework in which the agent is allowed to employ measure-valued controls and characterise the continuation utility as a solution to a…