Related papers: On Supermodular Contracts and Dense Subgraphs
We study the fundamental problem of designing contracts in principal-agent problems under uncertainty. Previous works mostly addressed Bayesian settings in which principal's uncertainty is modeled as a probability distribution over agent's…
We study the problem of persistent monitoring of a finite number of inter-connected geographical nodes by a group of heterogeneous mobile agents. We assign to each geographical node a concave and increasing reward function that resets to…
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…
We study the problem of differentially private constrained maximization of decomposable submodular functions. A submodular function is decomposable if it takes the form of a sum of submodular functions. The special case of maximizing a…
We study an abstract optimal auction problem for a single good or service. This problem includes environments where agents have budgets, risk preferences, or multi-dimensional preferences over several possible configurations of the good…
We study the problem of maximizing a submodular function, subject to a cardinality constraint, with a set of agents communicating over a connected graph. We propose a distributed greedy algorithm that allows all the agents to converge to a…
Complements between goods - where one good takes on added value in the presence of another - have been a thorn in the side of algorithmic mechanism designers. On the one hand, complements are common in the standard motivating applications…
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…
Consider a principal who wants to search through a space of stochastic solutions for one maximizing their utility. If the principal cannot conduct this search on their own, they may instead delegate this problem to an agent with distinct…
This paper investigates the distributed online optimization problem over a multi-agent network subject to local set constraints and coupled inequality constraints, which has a lot of applications in many areas, such as wireless sensor…
Submodular maximization is a general optimization problem with a wide range of applications in machine learning (e.g., active learning, clustering, and feature selection). In large-scale optimization, the parallel running time of an…
We study a unified framework for optimization problems defined on dual-modular instances, where the input comprises a finite ground set $V$ and two set functions: a monotone supermodular reward function $\f$ and a strictly monotone…
We propose to study electricity capacity remuneration mechanism design through a Principal-Agent approach. The Principal represents the aggregation of electricity consumers (or a representative entity), subject to the physical risk of…
A fundamental component of the game theoretic approach to distributed control is the design of local utility functions.Relative to resource allocation problems that are additive over the resources, Part I showed how to design local…
Crowdsourcing markets have emerged as a popular platform for matching available workers with tasks to complete. The payment for a particular task is typically set by the task's requester, and may be adjusted based on the quality of the…
In the principal-agent problem formulated by Myerson'82, agents have private information (type) and make private decisions (action), both of which are unobservable to the principal. Myerson pointed out an elegant linear programming solution…
In this work, we study sequential contracts under matroid constraints. In the sequential setting, an agent can take actions one by one. After each action, the agent observes the stochastic value of the action and then decides which action…
Traditional studies of combinatorial auctions often only consider linear constraints. The rise of smart grid presents a new class of auctions, characterized by quadratic constraints. This paper studies the {\em complex-demand knapsack…
We study multi-agent contracts, in which a principal delegates a task to multiple agents and incentivizes them to exert effort. Prior research has mostly focused on maximizing the principal's utility, often resulting in highly disparate…
A principal contracts with an agent who sequentially searches over projects to generate a prize. The principal initially knows only one of the agent's available projects and evaluates a contract by its worst-case performance. We…