Related papers: Dynamic delegation in promotion contests
We study repeated task assignment as an instrument for providing effort incentives. Unlike traditional incentive instruments, assignment of a task both determines who produces and provides incentives, and incentives for one worker spill…
This paper introduces a model of a stylized organization that is comprised of several departments that autonomously allocate tasks. To do so, the departments either take short-sighted decisions that immediately maximize their utility or…
We study a single task allocation problem where each worker connects to some other workers to form a network and the task requester only connects to some of the workers. The goal is to design an allocation mechanism such that each worker is…
Budgetary constraints force organizations to pursue only a subset of possible innovation projects. Identifying which subset is most promising is an error-prone exercise, and involving multiple decision makers may be prudent. This raises the…
A principal must allocate a set of heterogeneous tasks (or objects) among multiple agents. The principal has preferences over the allocation. Each agent has preferences over which tasks they are assigned, which are their private…
The assignment of tasks to multiple resources becomes an interesting game theoretic problem, when both the task owner and the resources are strategic. In the classical, nonstrategic setting, where the states of the tasks and resources are…
In recent years, various decentralized organizational forms have emerged, posing a challenge for organizational design. Some design elements, such as task allocation, become emergent properties that cannot be fully controlled from the top…
We study a setting in which a principal selects an agent to execute a collection of tasks according to a specified priority sequence. Agents, however, have their own individual priority sequences according to which they wish to execute the…
In this paper, we consider a general distributed system with multiple agents who select and then implement actions in the system. The system has an operator with a centralized objective. The agents, on the other hand, are selfinterested and…
Information sharing between individuals is crucial to improve performance in collective tasks. However, in a competitive world, individuals may be reluctant to share information with the others, and it is still unclear how the presence of…
This paper provides a novel solution to a task allocation problem, by which a group of agents decides on the assignment of a discrete set of tasks in a distributed manner. In this setting, heterogeneous agents have individual preferences…
We focus on how individual behavior that complies with social norms interferes with performance-based incentive mechanisms in organizations with multiple distributed decision-making agents. We model social norms to emerge from interactions…
We analyze how firms should design wage contracts when workers collaborate in teams and effort costs depend on colleagues through a peer network. Performance-based compensation generates incentives that cascade through the organization,…
I study optimal disclosure policies in sequential contests. A contest designer chooses at which periods to publicly disclose the efforts of previous contestants. I provide results for a wide range of possible objectives for the contest…
Proportional ranking rules aggregate approval-style preferences of agents into a collective ranking such that groups of agents with similar preferences are adequately represented. Motivated by the application of live Q&A platforms, where…
In the contest design problem, there are $n$ strategic contestants, each of whom decides an effort level. A contest designer with a fixed budget must then design a mechanism that allocates a prize $p_i$ to the $i$-th rank based on the…
We consider the problem of optimal budget allocation for crowdsourcing problems, allocating users to tasks to maximize our final confidence in the crowdsourced answers. Such an optimized worker assignment method allows us to boost the…
Incentives are more likely to elicit desired outcomes when they are designed based on accurate models of agents' strategic behavior. A growing literature, however, suggests that people do not quite behave like standard economic agents in a…
We study the design of effort-maximizing grading schemes between agents with private abilities. Assuming agents derive value from the information their grade reveals about their ability, we find that more informative grading schemes induce…
Dynamic task allocation is an essential requirement for multi-robot systems operating in unknown dynamic environments. It allows robots to change their behavior in response to environmental changes or actions of other robots in order to…