Related papers: Common Agency with Non-Delegation or Imperfect Com…
We study a multi-agent contracting problem where agents exert costly effort to achieve individually observable binary outcomes. While the principal can theoretically extract the full social welfare using a discriminatory contract that…
Many-to-many matching with contracts is studied in the framework of revealed preferences. All preferences are described by choice functions that satisfy natural conditions. Under a no-externality assumption individual preferences can be…
In the classical principal-agent problem, a principal must design a contract to incentivize an agent to perform an action on behalf of the principal. We study the classical principal-agent problem in a setting where the agent can be of one…
The paper proposes a bimodal logic that describes an interplay between distributed knowledge modality and coalition know-how modality. Unlike other similar systems, the one proposed here assumes perfect recall by all agents. Perfect recall…
We present two main theorems along the lines of Lyapunov's second method that guarantee asymptotic state consensus in multi-agent systems of agents in R^m with switching interconnection topologies. The two theorems complement each other in…
In delegation problems, a principal does not have the resources necessary to complete a particular task, so they delegate the task to an untrusted agent whose interests may differ from their own. Given any family of such problems and space…
Modern engineering systems include many components of different types and functions. Verifying that these systems satisfy given specifications can be an arduous task, as most formal verification methods are limited to systems of moderate…
G\"odel's Incompleteness Theorems suggest that no single formal system can capture the entirety of one's mathematical beliefs, while pointing at a hierarchy of systems of increasing logical strength that make progressively more explicit…
In this work we generalize standard Decision Theory by assuming that two outcomes can also be incomparable. Two motivating scenarios show how incomparability may be helpful to represent those situations where, due to lack of information,…
We consider multi-agent systems with cooperative interactions and study the convergence to consensus in the case of time-dependent connections, with possible communication failure. We prove a new condition ensuring consensus: we define a…
This paper studies contracting in the presence of externalities with a non-contractible outsider. Multiple equilibria arise from strategic symmetry between the insider agent and the outsider. To address strategic uncertainty, the principal…
Blameworthiness of an agent or a coalition of agents is often defined in terms of the principle of alternative possibilities: for the coalition to be responsible for an outcome, the outcome must take place and the coalition should have had…
Contract theory studies how a principal can incentivize agents to exert costly, unobservable effort through performance-based payments. While classical economic models provide elegant characterizations of optimal solutions, modern…
In this paper, we propose several consensus protocols of the first and second order for networked multi-agent systems and provide explicit representations for their asymptotic states. These representations involve the eigenprojection of the…
We use the notion of a promise to define local trust between agents possessing autonomous decision-making. An agent is trustworthy if it is expected that it will keep a promise. This definition satisfies most commonplace meanings of trust.…
A theorem on (partial) convergence to consensus of multiagent systems is presented. It is proven with tools studying the convergence properties of products of row stochastic matrices with positive diagonals which are infinite to the left.…
This paper studies delegation in a model of discrete choice. In the delegation problem, an uninformed principal must consult an informed agent to make a decision. Both the agent and principal have preferences over the decided-upon action…
We introduce several notions of reduction in distributed computing, and investigate reduction properties of two fundamental agreement tasks, namely Consensus and Atomic Commitment. We first propose the notion of reduction "a la Karp'', an…
In the combinatorial-action contract model (D\"utting et al., FOCS'21) a principal delegates the execution of a complex project to an agent, who can choose any subset from a given set of actions. Each set of actions incurs a cost to the…
This article presents a formal model demonstrating that genuine autonomy, the ability of a system to self-regulate and pursue objectives, fundamentally implies computational unpredictability from an external perspective. we establish…