Related papers: Successive Incentives
To regulate a social system comprised of self-interested agents, economic incentives are often required to induce a desirable outcome. This incentive design problem naturally possesses a bilevel structure, in which a designer modifies the…
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…
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…
Reward design is a critical part of the application of reinforcement learning, the performance of which strongly depends on how well the reward signal frames the goal of the designer and how well the signal assesses progress in reaching…
Incentives are more likely to elicit desired outcomes when they are designed based on accurate models of agents' strategic behavior. A growing literature, however, suggests that people do not quite behave like standard economic agents in a…
Imitation is widely observed in populations of decision-making agents. Using our recent convergence results for asynchronous imitation dynamics on networks, we consider how such networks can be efficiently driven to a desired equilibrium…
We consider the design of experiments to evaluate treatments that are administered by self-interested agents, each seeking to achieve the highest evaluation and win the experiment. For example, in an advertising experiment, a company wishes…
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…
We consider a finite-horizon discrete-time dynamic system jointly controlled by a designer and one or more agents, where the designer can influence the agents' actions through selective information disclosure. At each time step, the…
We analyze a two-period principal-agent model in which the principal faces a budget constraint, and the agent's private costs of performing tasks across the two periods may be correlated. We examine the optimal design of the reward scheme…
In this paper, we consider a general distributed system with multiple agents who select and then implement actions in the system. The system has an operator with a centralized objective. The agents, on the other hand, are selfinterested and…
We study how to optimally design selection mechanisms, accounting for agents' investment incentives. A principal wishes to allocate a resource of homogeneous quality to a heterogeneous population of agents. The principal commits to a…
We study incentive design when multiple principals simultaneously design mechanisms for their respective teams in environments with strategic spillovers. In this environment, each principal's set of incentive-compatible mechanisms--those…
We introduce a mean field game with rank-based reward: competing agents optimize their effort to achieve a goal, are ranked according to their completion time, and paid a reward based on their relative rank. First, we propose a tractable…
We apply control theoretic and optimization techniques to adaptively design incentives. In particular, we consider the problem of a planner with an objective that depends on data from strategic decision makers. The planner does not know the…
Incentives play an important role in (security and IT) risk management of a large-scale organization with multiple autonomous divisions. This paper presents an incentive mechanism design framework for risk management based on a…
We study the problem of designing an optimal sequence of incentives that a principal should offer to an agent so that the agent's optimal behavior under the incentives realizes the principal's objective expressed as a temporal logic…
Agents exert hidden effort to produce randomly-sized innovations in a technology they share. Flow payoffs grow as the technology develops, but so does the marginal cost of effort. I characterise the unique symmetric MPE with the quality of…
We consider a sequential inspection game where an inspector uses a limited number of inspections over a larger number of time periods to detect a violation (an illegal act) of an inspectee. Compared with earlier models, we allow varying…
Winners-take-all situations introduce an incentive for agents to diversify their behavior, since doing so will result in splitting an eventual price with fewer people. At the same time, when the payoff of a process depends on a parameter…