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Despite the significant progress in multiagent teamwork, existing research does not address the optimality of its prescriptions nor the complexity of the teamwork problem. Without a characterization of the optimality-complexity tradeoffs,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2011-06-24 D. V. Pynadath , M. Tambe

A general nonlinear $1$st-order consensus-based solution for distributed constrained convex optimization is proposed with network resource allocation applications. The solution is used to optimize continuously-differentiable strictly convex…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-11-22 Mohammadreza Doostmohammadian , Alireza Aghasi , Maria Vrakopoulou , Themistoklis Charalambous

We study a general task allocation problem, involving multiple agents that collaboratively accomplish tasks and where agents may fail to successfully complete the tasks assigned to them (known as execution uncertainty). The goal is to…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2015-09-18 Dengji Zhao , Sarvapali D. Ramchurn , Nicholas R. Jennings

Coalition formation is a key problem in automated negotiation among self-interested agents, and other multiagent applications. A coalition of agents can sometimes accomplish things that the individual agents cannot, or can do things more…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2009-09-29 Vincent Conitzer , Tuomas Sandholm

A contract is an economic tool used by a principal to incentivize one or more agents to exert effort on her behalf, by defining payments based on observable performance measures. A key challenge addressed by contracts -- known in economics…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Paul Duetting , Michal Feldman , Inbal Talgam-Cohen

A fundamental result in mechanism design theory, the so-called revelation principle, asserts that for many questions concerning the existence of mechanisms with a given outcome one can restrict attention to truthful direct…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2011-02-18 Paul Dütting , Felix Fischer , David C. Parkes

The central challenges in missing data models concern the identifiability of two distributions: the target law and the full law. The target law refers to the joint distribution of the data variables, whereas the full law refers to the joint…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-10-30 Juha Karvanen , Santtu Tikka

A prominent theme in behavioural contract theory is the study of present-biased agents represented through quasi-hyperbolic discounting. In a model of competitive credit provision, we study an alternative to this framework in which the…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-02-11 Siddharth Chatterjee , Daniel F. Garrett

Contract scheduling is a widely studied framework for designing real-time systems with interruptible capabilities. Previous work has showed that a prediction on the interruption time can help improve the performance of contract-based…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2024-04-22 Spyros Angelopoulos , Marcin Bienkowski , Christoph Dürr , Bertrand Simon

This paper explores many-to-one matching models, both with and without contracts, where doctors' preferences are private and hospitals' preferences are public and substitutable. It is known that any stable-dominating mechanism --which is…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2024-10-17 R. Pablo Arribillaga , E. Pepa Risma

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

A principal must decide between two options. Which one she prefers depends on the private information of two agents. One agent always prefers the first option; the other always prefers the second. Transfers are infeasible. One application…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2022-05-24 Deniz Kattwinkel , Axel Niemeyer , Justus Preusser , Alexander Winter

Preference aggregation is a fundamental problem in voting theory, in which public input rankings of a set of alternatives (called preferences) must be aggregated into a single preference that satisfies certain soundness properties. The…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2024-10-30 Kenan Wood , Hammurabi Mendes , Jonad Pulaj

Motivated by the growing requirements on the operation of complex engineering systems, we present contracts as specifications for continuous-time linear dynamical systems with inputs and outputs. A contract is defined as a pair of…

Dynamical Systems · Mathematics 2021-09-17 B. M. Shali , A. J. van der Schaft , B. Besselink

Generative models, particularly Large Language Models (LLMs), produce fluent outputs yet lack verifiable guarantees. We adapt Design by Contract (DbC) and type-theoretic principles to introduce a contract layer that mediates every LLM call.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Claudiu Leoveanu-Condrei

Can free agency be compatible with determinism? Compatibilists argue that the answer is yes, and it has been suggested that the computer science principle of "computational irreducibility" sheds light on this compatibility. It implies that…

History and Philosophy of Physics · Physics 2023-06-07 Marius Krumm , Markus P. Mueller

We study a Bayesian contract design problem in which a principal interacts with an unknown agent. We consider the single-parameter uncertainty model introduced by Alon et al. [2021], in which the agent's type is described by a single…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-02-21 Martino Bernasconi , Matteo Castiglioni , Andrea Celli

Diagonalization in the spirit of Cantor's diagonal arguments is a widely used tool in theoretical computer sciences to obtain structural results about computational problems and complexity classes by indirect proofs. The Uniform…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2019-02-22 Friederike Anna Dziemba

Collective phenomena in systems of interacting agents have helped us understand diverse social, ecological and biological observations. The corresponding explanations are challenged by incorrect information processing. In particular, the…

Physics and Society · Physics 2022-04-08 Johannes Falk , Edwin Eichler , Katja Windt , Marc-Thorsten Hütt

Agents rarely act in isolation -- their behavioral history, in particular, is public to others. We seek a non-asymptotic understanding of how a leader agent should shape this history to its maximal advantage, knowing that follower agent(s)…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2019-05-29 Vidya Muthukumar , Anant Sahai