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There is an increased sensitivity by people about how companies collect information about them, and how this information is packaged, used and sold. This perceived lack of control is highlighted by the helplessness of users of various…
Our goal is to solve both problems of adverse selection and moral hazard for multi-agent projects. In our model, each selected agent can work according to his private "capability tree". This means a process involving hidden actions, hidden…
We examine problems of ``intermediated implementation,'' in which a single principal can only regulate limited aspects of the consumption bundles traded between intermediaries and agents with hidden characteristics. An example is sales, in…
We consider a distributed multi-user system where individual entities possess observations or perceptions of one another, while the truth is only known to themselves, and they might have an interest in withholding or distorting the truth.…
A monopolistic seller aims to sell an indivisible item to multiple potential buyers. Each buyer's valuation depends on their private type and the item's quality. The seller can observe the quality but it is unknown to buyers. This quality…
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…
Collaborative machine learning (CML) provides a promising paradigm for democratizing advanced technologies by enabling cost-sharing among participants. However, the potential for rent-seeking behaviors among parties can undermine such…
Suppliers (including companies and individual prosumers) may wish to protect their private information when selling items they have in stock. A market is envisaged where private information can be protected through the use of differential…
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…
Social marketing is becoming increasingly important in contemporary business. Central to social marketing is quantifying how consumers choose between alternatives and how they influence each other. This work considers a new but simple…
We consider a hidden-action principal-agent model, in which actions require different amounts of effort, and the agent privately knows his ability that determines his cost of effort. We show that linear contracts admit approximation…
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…
Recent work has constructed economic mechanisms that are both truthful and differentially private. In these mechanisms, privacy is treated separately from the truthfulness; it is not incorporated in players' utility functions (and doing so…
One of the significant challenges to generating value-aligned behavior is to not only account for the specified user objectives but also any implicit or unspecified user requirements. The existence of such implicit requirements could be…
A large fraction of online display advertising is sold via guaranteed contracts: a publisher guarantees to the advertiser a certain number of user visits satisfying the targeting predicates of the contract. The publisher is then tasked with…
Promises, impositions, proposals, predictions, and suggestions are categorized as voluntary co-operational methods. The class of voluntary co-operational methods is included in the class of so-called directionals. Directionals are…
We study a new class of contract design problems where a principal delegates the execution of multiple projects to a set of agents. The principal's expected reward from each project is a combinatorial function of the agents working on it.…
In sponsored content and service markets, the content and service providers are able to subsidize their target mobile users through directly paying the mobile network operator, to lower the price of the data/service access charged by the…
Robot allocation plays an essential role in facilitating robotic service provision across various domains. Yet the increasing number of users and the uncertainties regarding the users' true service requirements have posed challenges for the…
We present a method for solving service allocation problems in which a set of services must be allocated to a set of agents so as to maximize a global utility. The method is completely distributed so it can scale to any number of services…