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We study the classic principal-agent model when the signal observed by the principal is chosen by the agent. We fully characterize the optimal information structure from an agent's perspective in a general moral hazard setting with limited…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2023-07-25 Majid Mahzoon , Ali Shourideh , Ariel Zetlin-Jones

We study sequential search without priors. Our interest lies in decision rules that are close to being optimal under each prior and after each history. We call these rules dynamically robust. The search literature employs optimal rules…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2020-08-04 Karl H. Schlag , Andriy Zapechelnyuk

We study strategic interaction in data-driven games where players face uncertainty about payoff distributions inferred from finite samples. To model calibrated attitudes toward such uncertainty, we formulate distributionally robust games…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Bharat Gangwani , Arunesh Sinha

We study procurement design when the buyer is uncertain about both the value of the good and the seller's cost. The buyer has a conjectured model but does not fully trust it. She first identifies mechanisms that maximize her worst-case…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-12-10 Debasis Mishra , Sanket Patil , Alessandro Pavan

A default assumption in the design of reinforcement-learning algorithms is that a decision-making agent always explores to learn optimal behavior. In sufficiently complex environments that approach the vastness and scale of the real world,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-23 Dilip Arumugam , Saurabh Kumar , Ramki Gummadi , Benjamin Van Roy

Training agents in multi-agent competitive games presents significant challenges due to their intricate nature. These challenges are exacerbated by dynamics influenced not only by the environment but also by opponents' strategies. Existing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-22 The Viet Bui , Tien Mai , Thanh Hong Nguyen

Response-adaptive allocation designs refer to a class of designs where the probability an observation is assigned to a treatment is changed throughout an experiment based on the accrued responses. Such procedures result in random treatment…

Methodology · Statistics 2022-08-04 Adam Lane

In the future, artificial learning agents are likely to become increasingly widespread in our society. They will interact with both other learning agents and humans in a variety of complex settings including social dilemmas. We consider the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2019-11-21 Tobias Baumann , Thore Graepel , John Shawe-Taylor

An agent acquires a costly flexible signal before making a decision. We explore to what degree knowledge of the agent's information costs helps predict her behavior. We establish an impossibility result: learning costs alone generate no…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2023-04-05 Elliot Lipnowski , Doron Ravid

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

We study the problem of eliciting the preferences of a decision-maker through a moderate number of pairwise comparison queries to make them a high quality recommendation for a specific problem. We are motivated by applications in high…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-12-09 Phebe Vayanos , Yingxiao Ye , Duncan McElfresh , John Dickerson , Eric Rice

Detection of malicious behavior is a fundamental problem in security. One of the major challenges in using detection systems in practice is in dealing with an overwhelming number of alerts that are triggered by normal behavior (the…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2019-06-24 Liang Tong , Aron Laszka , Chao Yan , Ning Zhang , Yevgeniy Vorobeychik

The hidden-action model captures a fundamental problem of principal-agent theory and provides an optimal sharing rule when only the outcome but not the effort can be observed. However, the hidden-action model builds on various explicit and…

General Economics · Economics 2020-04-15 Stephan Leitner , Friederike Wall

We study linear-quadratic games of incomplete information with Gaussian uncertainty, where each player's payoff depends on a privately observed type and a common state. The designer observes the state, elicits types, and sells action…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Alessandro Bonatti , Munther A. Dahleh , Thibaut Horel

We consider the mechanism design problem of a principal allocating a single good to one of several agents without monetary transfers. Each agent desires the good and uses it to create value for the principal. We designate this value as the…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2024-06-26 Halil İbrahim Bayrak , Çağıl Koçyiğit , Daniel Kuhn , Mustafa Çelebi Pınar

Our goal is to build robust optimization problems for making decisions based on complex data from the past. In robust optimization (RO) generally, the goal is to create a policy for decision-making that is robust to our uncertainty about…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2014-07-07 Theja Tulabandhula , Cynthia Rudin

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

Reinforcement learning algorithms usually assume that all actions are always available to an agent. However, both people and animals understand the general link between the features of their environment and the actions that are feasible.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-29 Khimya Khetarpal , Zafarali Ahmed , Gheorghe Comanici , David Abel , Doina Precup

We introduce a class of learning problems where the agent is presented with a series of tasks. Intuitively, if there is relation among those tasks, then the information gained during execution of one task has value for the execution of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2012-09-06 Christos Dimitrakakis

We study reward design strategies for incentivizing a reinforcement learning agent to adopt a policy from a set of admissible policies. The goal of the reward designer is to modify the underlying reward function cost-efficiently while…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-07 Kiarash Banihashem , Adish Singla , Jiarui Gan , Goran Radanovic