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This paper studies how uncertainty about problem difficulty shapes problem-solving strategies. I develop a dynamic model where an agent solves a problem by brainstorming approaches of unknown quality and allocating a fixed effort budget…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-04-02 Nicholas Wu

Employers are concerned not only with a prospective worker's ability, but also their propensity to avoid shirking. This paper proposes a new experimental framework to study how Principals trade-off measures of ability and prosocial behavior…

General Economics · Economics 2025-11-03 Andrew Leal

This work suggests modifications to a previously introduced class of heterogeneous agent models that allow for the inclusion of different types of agent motivations and behaviours in a unified way. The agents operate within a highly…

Trading and Market Microstructure · Quantitative Finance 2009-11-13 H. Lamba , T. Seaman

I study the optimal provision of information in a long-term relationship between a sender and a receiver. The sender observes a persistent, evolving state and commits to send signals over time to the receiver, who sequentially chooses…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2023-03-20 Ian Ball

We examine how causal beliefs affect an agent's choices and how feedback on those choices leads to updated causal beliefs. Building on the structural-equations framework for modeling causality, we first examine the general problem of…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-03-11 Joseph Y. Halpern , Evan Piermont , Marie-Louise Vierø

In speculative markets, risk-free profit opportunities are eliminated by traders exploiting them. Markets are therefore often described as "informationally efficient", rapidly removing predictable price changes, and leaving only residual…

Trading and Market Microstructure · Quantitative Finance 2013-10-08 Felix Patzelt , Klaus R. Pawelzik

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…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-09-06 Yakov Babichenko , Inbal Talgam-Cohen , Haifeng Xu , Konstantin Zabarnyi

We study hidden-action principal-agent problems with multiple agents. These are problems in which a principal commits to an outcome-dependent payment scheme in order to incentivize some agents to take costly, unobservable actions that lead…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-02-01 Matteo Castiglioni , Alberto Marchesi , Nicola Gatti

Recently, Frazier et al. proposed a natural model for crowdsourced exploration of different a priori unknown options: a principal is interested in the long-term welfare of a population of agents who arrive one by one in a multi-armed bandit…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2015-12-29 Li Han , David Kempe , Ruixin Qiang

The flourishing of fake news is favored by recommendation algorithms of online social networks which, based on previous users activity, provide content adapted to their preferences and so create filter bubbles. We introduce an analytically…

Physics and Society · Physics 2020-10-28 Giordano De Marzo , Andrea Zaccaria , Claudio Castellano

Peer prediction mechanisms are often adopted to elicit truthful contributions from crowd workers when no ground-truth verification is available. Recently, mechanisms of this type have been developed to incentivize effort exertion, in…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2016-12-05 Yang Liu , Yiling Chen

Maximizing long-term rewards is the primary goal in sequential decision-making problems. The majority of existing methods assume that side information is freely available, enabling the learning agent to observe all features' states before…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-19 Saeed Ghoorchian , Evgenii Kortukov , Setareh Maghsudi

We show that it can be suboptimal for Bayesian decision-making agents employing social learning to use correct prior probabilities as their initial beliefs. We consider sequential Bayesian binary hypothesis testing where each individual…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2026-03-12 Joong Bum Rhim , Vivek K Goyal

We study sequential social learning with endogenous information acquisition when agents have a taste for nonconformity. Each agent observes predecessors' actions, chooses whether to acquire a private signal (and its precision), and then…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-01-05 Georgy Lukyanov , Vasilii Ivanik

We study the diffusion of a true and a false message (misinformation) when agents are biased and able to verify messages. As a recipient of a false message who verifies it becomes informed of the truth, a higher prevalence of misinformation…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-02-25 Luca Paolo Merlino , Nicole Tabasso

Opponent modeling consists in modeling the strategy or preferences of an agent thanks to the data it provides. In the context of automated negotiation and with machine learning, it can result in an advantage so overwhelming that it may…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-01-02 Cédric Buron , Sylvain Ductor , Zahia Guessoum

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…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-11-26 Andrew Koh , Sivakorn Sanguanmoo , Weijie Zhong

Automated fact checking systems have been proposed that quickly provide veracity prediction at scale to mitigate the negative influence of fake news on people and on public opinion. However, most studies focus on veracity classifiers of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-06-15 Shih-Chieh Dai , Yi-Li Hsu , Aiping Xiong , Lun-Wei Ku

We study an online learning version of the generalized principal-agent model, where a principal interacts repeatedly with a strategic agent possessing private types, private rewards, and taking unobservable actions. The agent is non-myopic,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Yuchen Wu , Xinyi Zhong , Zhuoran Yang

We consider a model of a data broker selling information to a single agent to maximize his revenue. The agent has a private valuation of the additional information, and upon receiving the signal from the data broker, the agent can conduct…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2023-08-08 Yingkai Li