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This work considers a repeated principal-agent bandit game, where the principal can only interact with her environment through the agent. The principal and the agent have misaligned objectives and the choice of action is only left to the…

We consider a two-road dynamic routing game where the state of one of the roads (the "risky road") is stochastic and may change over time. This generates room for experimentation. A central planner may wish to induce some of the (finite…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2020-01-13 Emily Meigs , Francesca Parise , Asuman Ozdaglar , Daron Acemoglu

In many predictive decision-making scenarios, such as credit scoring and academic testing, a decision-maker must construct a model that accounts for agents' propensity to "game" the decision rule by changing their features so as to receive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-08-26 Yonadav Shavit , Benjamin Edelman , Brian Axelrod

Reward functions are central in reinforcement learning (RL), guiding agents towards optimal decision-making. The complexity of RL tasks requires meticulously designed reward functions that effectively drive learning while avoiding…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-03-31 Rati Devidze

Reinforcement-learning agents seek to maximize a reward signal through environmental interactions. As humans, our job in the learning process is to design reward functions to express desired behavior and enable the agent to learn such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-08-08 Zhiyuan Zhou , Shreyas Sundara Raman , Henry Sowerby , Michael L. Littman

In this work, we study sequential contracts under matroid constraints. In the sequential setting, an agent can take actions one by one. After each action, the agent observes the stochastic value of the action and then decides which action…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Kanstantsin Pashkovich , Jacob Skitsko , Yun Xing

Autonomous agents optimize the reward function we give them. What they don't know is how hard it is for us to design a reward function that actually captures what we want. When designing the reward, we might think of some specific training…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-10-08 Dylan Hadfield-Menell , Smitha Milli , Pieter Abbeel , Stuart Russell , Anca Dragan

We consider Incentive Decision Processes, where a principal seeks to reduce its costs due to another agent's behavior, by offering incentives to the agent for alternate behavior. We focus on the case where a principal interacts with a…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2012-10-19 Sashank J. Reddi , Emma Brunskill

In the framework of evolutionary games with institutional reciprocity, limited incentives are at disposal for rewarding cooperators and punishing defectors. In the simplest case, it can be assumed that, depending on their strategies, all…

Populations and Evolution · Quantitative Biology 2014-09-05 Xiaojie Chen , Matjaz Perc

In this paper, we consider the problem of a Principal aiming at designing a reward function for a population of heterogeneous agents. We construct an incentive based on the ranking of the agents, so that a competition among the latter is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-28 Clémence Alasseur , Erhan Bayraktar , Roxana Dumitrescu , Quentin Jacquet

We study the design of functional incentive mechanisms for dynamical systems, in which a leader designs a fixed incentive function to motivate a self-interested follower to actuate the system beneficially over an extended horizon, without…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-05-01 Jonas G. Matt , Saverio Bolognani , Florian Dörfler

Recent developments in sequential experimental design look to construct a policy that can efficiently navigate the design space, in a way that maximises the expected information gain. Whilst there is work on achieving tractable policies for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-20 Yasir Zubayr Barlas , Kizito Salako

Federated learning promises significant sample-efficiency gains by pooling data across multiple agents, yet incentive misalignment is an obstacle: each update is costly to the contributor but boosts every participant. We introduce a…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-02-02 Ariel D. Procaccia , Han Shao , Itai Shapira

We analyze how firms should design wage contracts when workers collaborate in teams and effort costs depend on colleagues through a peer network. Performance-based compensation generates incentives that cascade through the organization,…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-04-17 Marc Claveria-Mayol , Pau Milán , Nicolás Oviedo-Dávila

We consider active learning under incentive compatibility constraints. The main application of our results is to economic experiments, in which a learner seeks to infer the parameters of a subject's preferences: for example their attitudes…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2019-11-15 Federico Echenique , Siddharth Prasad

We consider a simple sequential allocation procedure for sharing indivisible items between agents in which agents take turns to pick items. Supposing additive utilities and independence between the agents, we show that the expected utility…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-04-24 Thomas Kalinowski , Nina Nardoytska , Toby Walsh

Reinforcement learning algorithms describe how an agent can learn an optimal action policy in a sequential decision process, through repeated experience. In a given environment, the agent policy provides him some running and terminal…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2020-03-24 Arthur Charpentier , Romuald Elie , Carl Remlinger

Sequential search models provide a powerful framework for studying consumer search using rich data that records the sequence of consumer actions taken during the search process. In existing empirical applications, their implementation often…

Econometrics · Economics 2026-05-05 Tinghan Zhang

I study the optimal design of ratings to motivate agent investment in quality when transfers are unavailable. The principal designs a rating scheme that maps the agent's quality to a (possibly stochastic) score. The agent has private…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-08-11 Peiran Xiao

A sequential decision-making agent balances between exploring to gain new knowledge about an environment and exploiting current knowledge to maximize immediate reward. For environments studied in the traditional literature, optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-23 Dilip Arumugam , Wanqiao Xu , Benjamin Van Roy