Related papers: Agent-Designed Contracts: How to Sell Hidden Actio…
We address the problem of affordance reasoning in diverse scenes that appear in the real world. Affordances relate the agent's actions to their effects when taken on the surrounding objects. In our work, we take the egocentric view of the…
We suggest that the analysis of incomplete contracting developed by law and economics researchers can provide a useful framework for understanding the AI alignment problem and help to generate a systematic approach to finding solutions. We…
Similar to what happens between humans in the real world, in open multi-agent systems distributed over the Internet, such as online social networks or wiki technologies, agents often form coalitions by agreeing to act as a whole in order to…
In order to be useful in the real world, AI agents need to plan and act in the presence of others, who may include adversarial and cooperative entities. In this paper, we consider the problem where an autonomous agent needs to act in a…
We consider the problem of how strategic users with asymmetric information can learn an underlying time varying state in a user-recommendation system. Users who observe private signals about the state, sequentially make a decision about…
Smart contracts are appealing because they are self-executing business agreements between parties with the predefined and immutable obligations and rights. However, as with all software, smart contracts may contain vulnerabilities because…
In a delegation problem, a principal P with commitment power tries to pick one out of $n$ options. Each option is drawn independently from a known distribution. Instead of inspecting the options herself, P delegates the information…
We present the choreography enactment pricing game, a cooperative game-theoretic model for the study of scheduling of jobs using competitor service providers. A choreography (a peer-to-peer service composition model) needs a set of services…
Existing techniques of Design by Contract do not allow software developers to specify complete contracts in many cases. Incomplete contracts leave room for malicious implementations. This article complements Design by Contract with a simple…
We present a strategic analysis of a trust model that has recently been proposed for promoting cooperative behaviour in user-centric networks. The mechanism for cooperation is based on a combination of reputation and virtual currency…
We study the principal-agent problem with a third party that we call social planner, whose responsibility is to reconcile the conflicts of interest between the two players and induce socially optimal outcome in terms of some given social…
This paper studies how uncertainty about problem difficulty shapes problem-solving strategies. I develop a dynamic model where an agent solves a problem by brainstorming approaches of unknown quality and allocating a fixed effort budget…
A principal designs an algorithm that generates a publicly observable prediction of a binary state. She must decide whether to act directly based on the prediction or to delegate the decision to an agent with private information but…
A prominent theme in behavioural contract theory is the study of present-biased agents represented through quasi-hyperbolic discounting. In a model of competitive credit provision, we study an alternative to this framework in which the…
Personalisation of products and services is fast becoming the driver of success in banking and commerce. Machine learning holds the promise of gaining a deeper understanding of and tailoring to customers' needs and preferences. Whereas…
We study information disclosure in competitive markets with adverse selection. Sellers privately observe product quality, with higher quality entailing higher production costs, while buyers trade at the market-clearing price after observing…
Distributed estimation that recruits potentially large groups of humans to collect data about a phenomenon of interest has emerged as a paradigm applicable to a broad range of detection and estimation tasks. However, it also presents a…
We design an optimal contract between a demand response aggregator (DRA) and a customer for incentive-based demand response. We consider a setting in which the customer is asked to reduce her consumption by the DRA and she is compensated…
A principal who values an object allocates it to one or more agents. Agents learn private information (signals) from an information designer about the allocation payoff to the principal. Monetary transfer is not available but the principal…
We consider the pricing problem faced by a seller who assigns a price to a good that confers its benefits not only to its buyers, but also to other individuals around them. For example, a snow-blower is potentially useful not only to the…