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This work studies a dynamic mechanism design problem in which a principal delegates decision makings to a group of privately-informed agents without the monetary transfer or burning. We consider that the principal privately possesses…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-01-19 Tao Zhang , Quanyan Zhu

We consider a principal agent project selection problem with asymmetric information. There are $N$ projects and the principal must select exactly one of them. Each project provides some profit to the principal and some payoff to the agent…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-04-15 Sumit Goel , Wade Hann-Caruthers

We consider a model of a data broker selling information to a single agent to maximize his revenue. The agent has a private valuation of the additional information, and upon receiving the signal from the data broker, the agent can conduct…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2023-08-08 Yingkai Li

How does one test empirically the hypothesis that a decision maker (DM) is being influenced by information via Bayesian persuasion? In this paper, I consider a DM whose state-dependent preferences are known to an analyst, who sees the…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-05-13 Jeffrey Mensch

The Bayesian persuasion model studies communication between an informed sender and a receiver with a payoff-relevant action, emphasizing the ability of a sender to extract maximal surplus from his informational advantage. In this paper we…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2020-06-04 Ronen Gradwohl , Niklas Hahn , Martin Hoefer , Rann Smorodinsky

How to incentivize self-interested agents to explore when they prefer to exploit? Consider a population of self-interested agents that make decisions under uncertainty. They "explore" to acquire new information and "exploit" this…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-10-23 Aleksandrs Slivkins

We characterize the optimal reward functions (scoring rules) that incentivize an agent to acquire information and report it truthfully to the principal. The optimal scoring rules let the agent make a simple binary bet in single-dimensional…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Jason D. Hartline , Yingkai Li , Liren Shan , Yifan Wu

A principal has $m$ identical objects to allocate among a group of $n$ agents. Objects are desirable and the principal's value of assigning an object to an agent is the agent's private information. The principal can verify up to $k$ agents,…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2024-09-04 Albin Erlanson , Andreas Kleiner

Timing decisions are common: when to file your taxes, finish a referee report, or complete a task at work. We ask whether time preferences can be inferred when \textsl{only} task completion is observed. To answer this question, we analyze…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2019-05-13 Paul Heidhues , Philipp Strack

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…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-10-30 Donya G. Dobakhshari , Lav R. Varshney , Vijay Gupta

Motivating careerists is challenging for political organizations. Without explicit contracts, careerists often pander to public opinions or their superiors' preferences. Worse, when tasked with implementing these distorted decisions, they…

General Economics · Economics 2026-05-15 Liqun Liu

An agent acquires information dynamically until her belief about a binary state reaches an upper or lower threshold. She can choose any signal process subject to a constraint on the rate of entropy reduction. Strategies are ordered by "time…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2024-08-23 Daniel Chen , Weijie Zhong

We consider the classic veto bargaining model but allow the agenda setter to engage in persuasion to convince the veto player to approve her proposal. We fully characterize the optimal proposal and experiment when Vetoer has quadratic loss,…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2023-10-23 Jenny S Kim , Kyungmin Kim , Richard Van Weelden

A network of agents attempt to learn some unknown state of the world drawn by nature from a finite set. Agents observe private signals conditioned on the true state, and form beliefs about the unknown state accordingly. Each agent may face…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-03-13 Shahin Shahrampour , Mohammad Amin Rahimian , Ali Jadbabaie

In order to study updating rules, we consider the problem of a malevolent principal screening an imperfectly Bayesian agent. We uncover a fundamental dichotomy between underreaction and overreaction to information. If an agent's posterior…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2024-05-15 Konstantin von Beringe , Mark Whitmeyer

Consider a university assigning students to courses and dorms. While many mechanisms are available, they each have their own drawbacks. Running serial dictatorship once for all goods is highly unfair, but running serial dictatorship…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-03-19 Eric Gao

How should an agent (the sender) observing multi-dimensional data (the state vector) persuade another agent to take the desired action? We show that it is always optimal for the sender to perform a (non-linear) dimension reduction by…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-10-05 Semyon Malamud , Andreas Schrimpf

Recent work has considered theoretical models for the behavior of agents with specific behavioral biases: rather than making decisions that optimize a given payoff function, the agent behaves inefficiently because its decisions suffer from…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2017-06-06 Jon Kleinberg , Sigal Oren , Manish Raghavan

As AI agents become more autonomous, properly aligning their objectives with human preferences becomes increasingly important. We study how effectively an AI agent learns a human principal's preference in choice under risk via stated versus…

General Economics · Economics 2026-04-01 Keaton Ellis , Wanying Huang

We study a simple problem of allocating common-value goods. The designer seeks to allocate the goods to as many unit-demand agents as possible without monetary transfers, while agents, who possess partial private information about the…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-04-22 Hiroto Sato , Ryo Shirakawa