Related papers: Designing Simple Mechanisms
Building software-driven systems that are easily understood becomes a challenge, with their ever-increasing complexity and autonomy. Accordingly, recent research efforts strive to aid in designing explainable systems. Nevertheless, a common…
This short article is devoted to the dynamics of controlled (and, therefore, open) systems. The internal forces, which appear only in the presence of external free controls and depend explicitely on them, are considered. Such interactive…
We consider a monopolist seller facing a single buyer with additive valuations over n heterogeneous, independent items. It is known that in this important setting optimal mechanisms may require randomization [HR12], use menus of infinite…
In many settings -- like market research and social choice -- people may be presented with unfamiliar options. Classical mechanisms may perform poorly because they fail to incentivize people to learn about these options, or worse, encourage…
Algorithms are often used to produce decision-making rules that classify or evaluate individuals. When these individuals have incentives to be classified a certain way, they may behave strategically to influence their outcomes. We develop a…
In a multi-party machine learning system, different parties cooperate on optimizing towards better models by sharing data in a privacy-preserving way. A major challenge in learning is the incentive issue. For example, if there is…
Significant effort has been made to understand user motivation and to elicit user participation in crowdsourcing systems. However, incentive engineering, i.e., designing incentives that can purposefully motivate users, is still an open…
We study mechanism design settings where the planner has an interest in agents receiving noisy signals about the types of other agents. We show that additional information about other agents can eliminate undesired equilibria, making it…
Selective rationalization has become a common mechanism to ensure that predictive models reveal how they use any available features. The selection may be soft or hard, and identifies a subset of input features relevant for prediction. The…
Coordination mechanisms aim to mitigate the impact of selfishness when scheduling jobs to different machines. Such a mechanism defines a scheduling policy within each machine and naturally induces a game among the selfish job owners. The…
Mechanism design is a well-established game-theoretic paradigm for designing games to achieve desired outcomes. This paper addresses a closely related but distinct concept, equilibrium design. Unlike mechanism design, the designer's…
In mechanism design, the gold standard solution concepts are dominant strategy incentive compatibility and Bayesian incentive compatibility. These solution concepts relieve the (possibly unsophisticated) bidders from the need to engage in…
Agents are systems that optimize an objective function in an environment. Together, the goal and the environment induce secondary objectives, incentives. Modeling the agent-environment interaction using causal influence diagrams, we can…
Ecologists and economists try to explain collective behavior in terms of competitive systems of selfish individuals with the ability to learn from the past. Statistical physicists have been investigating models which might contribute to the…
How do incentive levels affect strategic behaviour? We address this with an experiment that separately identifies own- and opponent-incentive effects in two dominance-solvable games that differ in strategic complexity. Higher own incentives…
The overall objective of Requirements Engineering is to specify, in a systematic way, a system that satisfies the expectations of its stakeholders. Despite tremendous effort in the field, recent studies demonstrate this is objective is not…
Economies and societal structures in general are complex stochastic systems which may not lend themselves well to algebraic analysis. An addition of subjective value criteria to the mechanics of interacting agents will further complicate…
Good economic mechanisms depend on the preferences of participants in the mechanism. For example, the revenue-optimal auction for selling an item is parameterized by a reserve price, and the appropriate reserve price depends on how much the…
In computer science, there is a distinction between closed systems, whose behavior is totally determined in advance, and open systems, that are systems maintaining a constant interaction with an unspecified environment. Closed systems are…
Research in cognitive psychology has established that whether people prefer simpler explanations to complex ones is context dependent, but the question of `simple vs. complex' becomes critical when an artificial agent seeks to explain its…