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Related papers: Designing Exploration Contracts

200 papers

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…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-11-07 Shiyun Lin , Zhihua Zhang

We consider a ubiquitous scenario in the Internet economy when individual decision-makers (henceforth, agents) both produce and consume information as they make strategic choices in an uncertain environment. This creates a three-way…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2021-04-09 Yishay Mansour , Aleksandrs Slivkins , Vasilis Syrgkanis , Zhiwei Steven Wu

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-03 Bingchen Wang , Zhaoxuan Wu , Fusheng Liu , Bryan Kian Hsiang Low

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…

General Economics · Economics 2021-07-09 Patrick Reinwald , Stephan Leitner , Friederike Wall

Principal agent games are a growing area of research which focuses on the optimal behaviour of a principal and an agent, with the former contracting work from the latter, in return for providing a monetary award. While this field…

Mathematical Finance · Quantitative Finance 2022-06-28 Dena Firoozi , Arvind V Shrivats , Sebastian Jaimungal

We propose a distributionally robust principal agent formulation, which generalizes some common variants of worst-case and Bayesian principal agent problems. We construct a theoretical framework to certify whether any surjective contract…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2024-01-17 Peter Zhang

Designing protocols enhancing cooperation for multi-agent systems remains a grand challenge. Cheap talk, defined as costless, non-binding communication before formal action, serves as a pivotal solution. However, existing theoretical…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2026-03-03 Zhao Song , Chen Shen , Zhen Wang , The Anh Han

We study contract design for welfare maximization in the well known "common agency" model of [Bernheim and Whinston, 1986]. This model combines the challenges of coordinating multiple principals with the fundamental challenge of contract…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2021-06-01 Tal Alon , Ron Lavi , Elisheva S. Shamash , Inbal Talgam-Cohen

This paper examines the optimal contracts in a two-dimensional screening model where one dimension(group identity) is verifiable by agents but not falsifiable. A principal offers contracts to agents who differ in cost types and group…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-04-02 Charles Po-Cheng Huang

We use the theory of cooperative games for the design of fair insurance contracts. An insurance contract needs to specify the premium to be paid and a possible participation in the benefit (or surplus) of the company. It results from the…

Mathematical Finance · Quantitative Finance 2020-09-10 Delia Coculescu , Freddy Delbaen

In this paper, we settle the problem of learning optimal linear contracts from data in the offline setting, where agent types are drawn from an unknown distribution and the principal's goal is to design a contract that maximizes her…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-05-28 Mikael Møller Høgsgaard

Exploration is widely regarded as one of the most challenging aspects of reinforcement learning (RL), with many naive approaches succumbing to exponential sample complexity. To isolate the challenges of exploration, we propose a new…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-02-10 Chi Jin , Akshay Krishnamurthy , Max Simchowitz , Tiancheng Yu

Crowdsourcing has emerged as a paradigm for leveraging human intelligence and activity to solve a wide range of tasks. However, strategic workers will find enticement in their self-interest to free-ride and attack in a crowdsourcing contest…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2018-01-01 Jianfeng Lu , Yun Xin , Zhao Zhang , Shaojie Tang , Songyuan Yan , Changbing Tang

This survey is focused on certain sequential decision-making problems that involve optimizing over probability functions. We discuss the relevance of these problems for learning and control. The survey is organized around a framework that…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-01-13 Emiland Garrabe , Giovanni Russo

In practice, incentive providers (i.e., principals) often cannot observe the reward realizations of incentivized agents, which is in contrast to many principal-agent models that have been previously studied. This information asymmetry…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-15 Ilgin Dogan , Zuo-Jun Max Shen , Anil Aswani

We consider the problem in which n items arrive to a market sequentially over time, where two agents compete to choose the best possible item. When an agent selects an item, he leaves the market and obtains a payoff given by the value of…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-04-12 Fabien Gensbittel , Dana Pizarro , Jérôme Renault

We consider search problems with nonobligatory inspection and single-item or combinatorial selection. A decision maker is presented with a number of items, each of which contains an unknown price, and can pay an inspection cost to observe…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-01-17 Ziv Scully , Laura Doval

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…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-03-03 Pirmin Braun , Niklas Hahn , Martin Hoefer , Conrad Schecker

We propose to study electricity capacity remuneration mechanism design through a Principal-Agent approach. The Principal represents the aggregation of electricity consumers (or a representative entity), subject to the physical risk of…

General Economics · Economics 2020-09-02 Clémence Alasseur , Heythem Farhat , Marcelo Saguan

We study a general class of Principal-Agent problems in continuous time under hidden action. By formulating the model as a coupled stochastic optimal control problem we are able to find a set of necessary conditions characterizing optimal…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2014-11-27 Boualem Djehiche , Peter Helgesson