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We investigate the mechanism design problem faced by a principal who hires \emph{multiple} agents to gather and report costly information. Then, the principal exploits the information to make an informed decision. We model this problem as a…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-07-13 Federico Cacciamani , Matteo Castiglioni , Nicola Gatti

The increasing deployment of AI is shaping the future landscape of the internet, which is set to become an integrated ecosystem of AI agents. Orchestrating the interaction among AI agents necessitates decentralized, self-sustaining…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Dima Ivanov , Paul Dütting , Inbal Talgam-Cohen , Tonghan Wang , David C. Parkes

We introduce and study a computational version of the principal-agent problem -- a classic problem in Economics that arises when a principal desires to contract an agent to carry out some task, but has incomplete information about the agent…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-05-18 David Hyland , Julian Gutierrez , Michael Wooldridge

This paper studies the performative prediction problem which optimizes a stochastic loss function with data distribution that depends on the decision variable. We consider a setting where the agent(s) provides samples adapted to the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-10-05 Qiang Li , Hoi-To Wai

In classic principal-agent problems such as Stackelberg games, contract design, and Bayesian persuasion, the agent best responds to the principal's committed strategy. We study repeated generalized principal-agent problems under the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Tao Lin , Yiling Chen

The incorporation of macro-actions (temporally extended actions) into multi-agent decision problems has the potential to address the curse of dimensionality associated with such decision problems. Since macro-actions last for stochastic…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-05-30 Kunal Menda , Yi-Chun Chen , Justin Grana , James W. Bono , Brendan D. Tracey , Mykel J. Kochenderfer , David Wolpert

We study a principal-agent team production model. The principal hires a team of agents to participate in a common production task. The exact effort of each agent is unobservable and unverifiable, but the total production outcome (e.g. the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Shiliang Zuo

Many real-life contractual relations differ completely from the clean, static model at the heart of principal-agent theory. Typically, they involve repeated strategic interactions of the principal and agent, taking place under uncertainty…

This work considers a novel information design problem and studies how the craft of payoff-relevant environmental signals solely can influence the behaviors of intelligent agents. The agents' strategic interactions are captured by a Markov…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2021-06-15 Tao Zhang , Quanyan Zhu

The general picture of game theoretic modeling dealt with here is characterized by a set of big players, also referred to as principals or major agents, acting on the background of large pools of small players, the impact of the behavior of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-11-12 Vassili N. Kolokoltsov , Oleg A. Malafeyev

This paper augments the reward received by a reinforcement learning agent with potential functions in order to help the agent learn (possibly stochastic) optimal policies. We show that a potential-based reward shaping scheme is able to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-23 Baicen Xiao , Bhaskar Ramasubramanian , Andrew Clark , Hannaneh Hajishirzi , Linda Bushnell , Radha Poovendran

Strategic learning studies how decision rules interact with agents who may strategically change their inputs/features to achieve better outcomes. In standard settings, models assume that the decision-maker's sole scope is to learn a…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Valia Efthymiou , Ekaterina Fedorova , Chara Podimata

We introduce an agent-based model of delegation relationships between a principal and an agent, which is based on the standard-hidden action model introduced by Holmstr\"om and, by doing so, provide a model which can be used to further…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2020-09-29 Patrick Reinwald , Stephan Leitner , Friederike Wall

This paper studies algorithmic decision-making under human's strategic behavior, where a decision maker uses an algorithm to make decisions about human agents, and the latter with information about the algorithm may exert effort…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-09-16 Tian Xie , Xuwei Tan , Xueru Zhang

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

Stochastic dynamic teams and games are rich models for decentralized systems and challenging testing grounds for multi-agent learning. Previous work that guaranteed team optimality assumed stateless dynamics, or an explicit coordination…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-03-28 Bora Yongacoglu , Gürdal Arslan , Serdar Yüksel

In reinforcement learning, an agent interacts sequentially with an environment to maximize a reward, receiving only partial, probabilistic feedback. This creates a fundamental exploration-exploitation trade-off: the agent must explore to…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2026-03-27 Josep Lumbreras , Ruo Cheng Huang , Yanglin Hu , Marco Fanizza , Mile Gu

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

Can a principal still offer optimal dynamic contracts that are linear in end-of-period outcomes when the agent controls a process that exhibits memory? We provide a positive answer by considering a general Gaussian setting where the output…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-09-23 Eduardo Abi Jaber , Stéphane Villeneuve

Modern AI systems increasingly operate inside markets and institutions where data, behavior, and incentives are endogenous. This paper develops an economic foundation for multi-agent learning by studying a principal-agent interaction in a…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-08 Nassim Helou