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Learning how to learn efficiently is a fundamental challenge for biological agents and a growing concern for artificial ones. To learn effectively, an agent must regulate its learning speed, balancing the benefits of rapid improvement…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-01-13 Valentina Njaradi , Rodrigo Carrasco-Davis , Peter E. Latham , Andrew Saxe

We study a robust contract design problem with deferred inspection, in which a principal allocates a scarce resource to an agent, observes the agent's realized outcome ex post at negligible cost, and conditions transfers on this information…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-01-12 Halil I. Bayrak , Martin Bichler

This paper studies optimal contract design in private market investing, focusing on internal decision making in venture capital and private equity firms. A principal relies on an agent who privately exerts costly due diligence effort and…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Jussi Keppo , Yingkai Li

Bilateral trade models the task of intermediating between two strategic agents, a seller and a buyer, willing to trade a good for which they hold private valuations. We study this problem from the perspective of a broker, in a regret…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-09-29 Simone Di Gregorio , Paul Dütting , Federico Fusco , Chris Schwiegelshohn

A principal contracts with an agent through an informed delegate. Although the principal cannot directly mediate the interaction, she can restrict the menus of contracts the delegate may offer. We characterize the outcomes implementable…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-05-22 João Thereze , Udayan Vaidya

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

We propose a pseudo-market solution to resource allocation problems subject to constraints. Our treatment of constraints is general: including bihierarchical constraints due to considerations of diversity in school choice, or scheduling in…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2020-11-09 Federico Echenique , Antonio Miralles , Jun Zhang

In this paper, we analyze a natural learning algorithm for uniform pacing of advertising budgets, equipped to adapt to varying ad sale platform conditions. On the demand side, advertisers face a fundamental technical challenge in automating…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-11-14 MohammadTaghi Hajiaghayi , Max Springer

Most microeconomic models of interest involve optimizing a piecewise linear function. These include contract design in hidden-action principal-agent problems, selling an item in posted-price auctions, and bidding in first-price auctions.…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Francesco Bacchiocchi , Matteo Castiglioni , Alberto Marchesi , Nicola Gatti

We study hidden-action principal-agent problems with multiple agents. Unlike previous work, we consider a general setting in which each agent has an arbitrary number of actions, and the joint action induces outcomes according to an…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-02-22 Federico Cacciamani , Martino Bernasconi , Matteo Castiglioni , Nicola Gatti

A principal has $m$ identical objects to allocate among a group of $n$ agents. Objects are desirable and the principal's value of assigning an object to an agent is the agent's private information. The principal can verify up to $k$ agents,…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2024-09-04 Albin Erlanson , Andreas Kleiner

This brief note considers the problem of learning with dynamic-optimizing principal-agent setting, in which the agents are allowed to have global perspectives about the learning process, i.e., the ability to view things according to their…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-01-12 Getachew K. Befekadu

The online advertising market, with its thousands of auctions run per second, presents a daunting challenge for advertisers who wish to optimize their spend under a budget constraint. Thus, advertising platforms typically provide automated…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-10-17 Dmytro Korenkevych , Frank Cheng , Artsiom Balakir , Alex Nikulkov , Lingnan Gao , Zhihao Cen , Zuobing Xu , Zheqing Zhu

I study a principal-agent model in which a principal hires an agent to collect information about an unknown continuous state. The agent acquires a signal whose distribution is centered around the state, controlling the signal's precision at…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-05-05 Fan Wu

We initiate the study of a repeated principal-agent problem over a finite horizon $T$, where a principal sequentially interacts with $K\geq 2$ types of agents arriving in an adversarial order. At each round, the principal strategically…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-08-05 Junyan Liu , Arnab Maiti , Artin Tajdini , Kevin Jamieson , Lillian J. Ratliff

I study whether and which expert incentives can be provided at what cost when the states of the world become non-contractible, but there is some noisy observation about the states that can be contracted upon. A principal hires an agent to…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-11-12 Zizhe Xia

A principal hires an agent to acquire soft information about an unknown state. Even though neither how the agent learns nor what the agent discovers are contractible, we show the principal is unconstrained as to what information the agent…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2023-07-31 Mark Whitmeyer , Kun Zhang

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-01-11 Craig Innes , Alex Lascarides , Stefano V Albrecht , Subramanian Ramamoorthy , Benjamin Rosman

Active learning agents typically employ a query selection algorithm which solely considers the agent's learning objectives. However, this may be insufficient in more realistic human domains. This work uses imitation learning to enable an…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-07-02 Kalesha Bullard , Yannick Schroecker , Sonia Chernova

We propose a new principal-agent framework where a principal communicates a roadmap -- a set of plausible outcome models and a prior belief over them -- to guide an agent who is learning the value of innovation. The agent trusts the prior…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-02-24 Florian Mudekereza