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I study a moral hazard problem between a principal and multiple agents who experience positive peer effects represented by a (weighted) network. Under the optimal linear contract, the principal provides high-powered incentives to central…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2024-06-18 Marc Claveria-Mayol

The host of a game presents two indistinguishable envelopes to an agent. One of the envelopes is randomly selected and allocated to the agent. The agent is informed that the monetary content of one of the envelopes is twice that of the…

Other Statistics · Statistics 2015-06-16 Jeffrey Brian Tyler

We explored decision-making dynamics in social systems, referencing the 'herd behavior' from prior studies where individuals follow preceding choices without understanding the underlying reasons. While previous research highlighted a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2023-12-29 Lu Li , Huangxing Li

A principal uses payments conditioned on stochastic outcomes of a team project to elicit costly effort from the team members. We develop a multi-agent generalization of a classic first-order approach to contract optimization by leveraging…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-03-13 Krishna Dasaratha , Benjamin Golub , Anant Shah

I study costly information acquisition in a two-sided matching problem, such as matching applicants to schools. An applicant's utility is a sum of common and idiosyncratic components. The idiosyncratic component is unknown to the applicant…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2021-10-22 Georgy Artemov

In this paper we revisit the basic variant of the classical secretary problem. We propose a new approach in which we separate between an agent that evaluates the secretary performance and one that has to make the hiring decision. The…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2020-05-27 Niklas Hahn , Martin Hoefer , Rann Smorodinsky

We introduce a stochastic principal-agent model. A principal and an agent interact in a stochastic environment, each privy to observations about the state not available to the other. The principal has the power of commitment, both to elicit…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-09-13 Jiarui Gan , Rupak Majumdar , Debmalya Mandal , Goran Radanovic

In recent studies of political decision-making, apparently anomalous behavior has been observed on the part of voters, in which negative information about a candidate strengthens, rather than weakens, a prior positive opinion about the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-06-12 William W. Cohen , David P. Redlawsk , Douglas Pierce

We study a communication game between an informed sender and an uninformed receiver with repeated interactions and voluntary transfers. Transfers motivate the receiver's decision-making and signal the sender's information. Although full…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2020-12-11 Anton Kolotilin , Hongyi Li

This paper considers the hidden-action model of the principal-agent problem, in which a principal incentivizes an agent to work on a project using a contract. We investigate whether contracts with bounded payments are learnable and…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-02-23 Yurong Chen , Zhaohua Chen , Xiaotie Deng , Zhiyi Huang

Learning-to-Defer routes each input to the expert that minimizes expected cost, but it assumes that the information available to every expert is fixed at decision time. Many modern systems violate this assumption: after selecting an expert,…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-29 Yannis Montreuil , Leïna Montreuil , Axel Carlier , Lai Xing Ng , Wei Tsang Ooi

We study a sender-receiver model in which the receiver can commit to a decision rule before the sender determines the information policy. The decision rule can depend on the information structure chosen by the sender and the realized…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-12-19 Dirk Bergemann , Tan Gan , Yingkai Li

It is often argued that an agent making decisions on behalf of two or more principals who have different utility functions should adopt a {\em Pareto-optimal} policy, i.e., a policy that cannot be improved upon for one agent without making…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2017-11-02 Andrew Critch , Stuart Russell

An agent choosing between various actions tends to take the one with the lowest cost. But this choice is arguably too rigid (not adaptive) to be useful in complex situations, e.g., where exploration-exploitation trade-off is relevant in…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2018-12-04 Armen E. Allahverdyan , Aram Galstyan , Ali E. Abbas , Zbigniew R. Struzik

In this research, we investigate the impact of delegating decision making to information technology (IT) on an important human decision bias - the sunk cost effect. To address our research question, we use a unique and very rich dataset…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2012-04-04 Philipp N. Herrmann , Dennis O. Kundisch , Mohammad S. Rahman

We consider a model where an agent has a repeated decision to make and wishes to maximize their total payoff. Payoffs are influenced by an action taken by the agent, but also an unknown state of the world that evolves over time. Before…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2021-01-20 Nicole Immorlica , Ian Kash , Brendan Lucier

As AI usage becomes more prevalent in social contexts, understanding agent-user interaction is critical to designing systems that improve both individual and group outcomes. We present an online behavioral experiment (N = 243) in which…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-02-16 Kehang Zhu , Nithum Thain , Vivian Tsai , James Wexler , Crystal Qian

We study misspecified Bayesian learning in principal-agent relationships, where an agent is assessed by an evaluator and rewarded by the market. The agent's outcome depends on their innate ability, costly effort -- whose effectiveness is…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-12-02 Federico Echenique , Anqi Li

Many settings of interest involving humans and machines -- from virtual personal assistants to autonomous vehicles -- can naturally be modelled as principals (humans) delegating to agents (machines), which then interact with each other on…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-08-07 Oliver Sourbut , Lewis Hammond , Harriet Wood

We consider the problem of creating assistants that can help agents solve new sequential decision problems, assuming the agent is not able to specify the reward function explicitly to the assistant. Instead of acting in place of the agent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-12-01 Sebastiaan De Peuter , Samuel Kaski