Related papers: Regret-Minimizing Contracts: Agency Under Uncertai…
In this paper, we initiate the computational problem of jointly designing information and contracts. We consider three possible classes of contracts with decreasing flexibility and increasing simplicity: ambiguous contracts, menus of…
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…
We consider robust counterparts of uncertain combinatorial optimization problems, where the difference to the best possible solution over all scenarios is to be minimized. Such minmax regret problems are typically harder to solve than their…
We study the problem of designing replication-proof bandit mechanisms when agents strategically register or replicate their own arms to maximize their payoff. Specifically, we consider Bayesian agents who only know the distribution from…
We show that in delegation problems, a principal benefits from belief misalignment vis-\`a-vis an agent when the latter can flexibly acquire costly information. The agent optimally succumbs to confirmatory learning, leading him to favor the…
We study Bayesian automated mechanism design in unstructured dynamic environments, where a principal repeatedly interacts with an agent, and takes actions based on the strategic agent's report of the current state of the world. Both the…
Team formation is ubiquitous in many sectors: education, labor markets, sports, etc. A team's success depends on its members' latent types, which are not directly observable but can be (partially) inferred from past performances. From the…
In a continuous-time setting where a risk-averse agent controls the drift of an output process driven by a Brownian motion, optimal contracts are linear in the terminal output; this result is well-known in a setting with moral hazard 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…
What data or environments to use for training to improve downstream performance is a longstanding and very topical question in reinforcement learning. In particular, Unsupervised Environment Design (UED) methods have gained recent attention…
We study agents communicating over an underlying network by exchanging messages, in order to optimize their individual regret in a common nonstochastic multi-armed bandit problem. We derive regret minimization algorithms that guarantee for…
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…
We study the incentivized information acquisition problem, where a principal hires an agent to gather information on her behalf. Such a problem is modeled as a Stackelberg game between the principal and the agent, where the principal…
Methods for learning optimal policies in autonomous agents often assume that the way the domain is conceptualised---its possible states and actions and their causal structure---is known in advance and does not change during learning. This…
We study the repeated principal-agent bandit game, where the principal indirectly interacts with the unknown environment by proposing incentives for the agent to play arms. Most existing work assumes the agent has full knowledge of the…
Models of economic decision makers often include idealized assumptions, such as rationality, perfect foresight, and access to all relevant pieces of information. These assumptions often assure the models' internal validity, but, at the same…
If we could define the set of all bad outcomes, we could hard-code an agent which avoids them; however, in sufficiently complex environments, this is infeasible. We do not know of any general-purpose approaches in the literature to avoiding…
We consider how an agent should update her uncertainty when it is represented by a set $\P$ of probability distributions and the agent observes that a random variable $X$ takes on value $x$, given that the agent makes decisions using the…
We present a novel bilateral negotiation model that allows a self-interested agent to learn how to negotiate over multiple issues in the presence of user preference uncertainty. The model relies upon interpretable strategy templates…
We study the problem of demand response contracts in electricity markets by quantifying the impact of considering a mean-field of consumers, whose consumption is impacted by a common noise. We formulate the problem as a Principal-Agent…