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In a framework close to the one developed by Holmstr\"om and Milgrom [44], we study the optimal contracting scheme between a Principal and several Agents. Each hired Agent is in charge of one project, and can make efforts towards managing…

Economics · Quantitative Finance 2016-05-27 Romuald Elie , Dylan Possamaï

Allocating scarce resources among agents to maximize global utility is, in general, computationally challenging. We focus on problems where resources enable agents to execute actions in stochastic environments, modeled as Markov decision…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2011-10-13 D. A. Dolgov , E. H. Durfee

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…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2020-08-11 Mengjing Chen , Yang Liu , Weiran Shen , Yiheng Shen , Pingzhong Tang , Qiang Yang

It is often beneficial for agents to pool their resources in order to better accommodate fluctuations in individual demand. Many multi-round resource allocation mechanisms operate in an online manner: in each round, the agents specify their…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-08-02 Fu Li , C. Gregory Plaxton , Vaibhav B. Sinha

Traditional approaches to the design of multi-agent navigation algorithms consider the environment as a fixed constraint, despite the influence of spatial constraints on agents' performance. Yet hand-designing conducive environment layouts…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-05-22 Zhan Gao , Amanda Prorok

We introduce a methodology for efficiently computing a lower bound to empowerment, allowing it to be used as an unsupervised cost function for policy learning in real-time control. Empowerment, being the channel capacity between actions and…

Motivated by the problem of market power in electricity markets, we introduced in previous works a mechanism for simplified markets of two agents with linear cost. In standard procurement auctions, the market power resulting from the…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2019-07-25 Benjamin Heymann , Alejandro Jofré

The football transfer market is a complex, dynamic environment in which clubs compete to acquire players who strengthen their squads. While several frameworks estimate a player's worth, a comprehensive approach that captures both squad…

Applications · Statistics 2026-05-15 Tathagata Basu , Soudeep Deb , Rishideep Roy

We consider moral hazard problems where a principal has access to rich monitoring data about an agent's action. Rather than focusing on optimal contracts (which are known to in general be complicated), we characterize the optimal rate at…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2024-07-04 Mira Frick , Ryota Iijima , Yuhta Ishii

We study a multi-agent contract design problem with moral hazard. In our model, each agent exerts costly effort towards an individual task at which it may either succeed or fail, and the principal, who wishes to encourage effort, has an…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-07-09 Sumit Goel , Wade Hann-Caruthers

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

We study a Bayesian persuasion problem with externalities. In this model, a principal sends signals to inform multiple agents about the state of the world. Simultaneously, due to the existence of externalities in the agents' utilities, the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-18 Jonathan Shaki , Jiarui Gan , Sarit Kraus

Advances in artificial intelligence often stem from the development of new environments that abstract real-world situations into a form where research can be done conveniently. This paper contributes such an environment based on ideas…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-05-16 Michael Bradley Johanson , Edward Hughes , Finbarr Timbers , Joel Z. Leibo

I characterize optimal government policy in a sticky-price economy with different types of consumers and endogenous financial constraints in the banking and entrepreneurial sectors. The competitive equilibrium allocation is constrained…

General Economics · Economics 2025-01-29 Aliaksandr Zaretski

We show that in delegation problems, a principal benefits from belief misalignment vis-\`a-vis an agent when the latter can flexibly acquire costly information. The agent optimally succumbs to confirmatory learning, leading him to favor the…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-07-30 Pavel Ilinov , Andrei Matveenko , Maxim Senkov , Egor Starkov

In this paper, we study moral hazard problems in contract theory by adding an exogenous Planner to manage the actions of Agents hired by a Principal. We provide conditions ensuring that Pareto optima exist for the Agents using the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-06-06 Thibaut Mastrolia

An indivisible object may be sold to one of $n$ agents who know their valuations of the object. The seller would like to use a revenue-maximizing mechanism but her knowledge of the valuations' distribution is scarce: she knows only the…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2020-08-27 Alex Suzdaltsev

A principal contracts with an agent who sequentially searches over projects to generate a prize. The principal initially knows only one of the agent's available projects and evaluates a contract by its worst-case performance. We…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-09-17 Théo Durandard , Udayan Vaidya , Boli Xu

In revenue maximization of selling a digital product in a social network, the utility of an agent is often considered to have two parts: a private valuation, and linearly additive influences from other agents. We study the incomplete…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2011-09-27 Wei Chen , Pinyan Lu , Xiaorui Sun , Bo Tang , Yajun Wang , Zeyuan Allen Zhu

A sender sells an object of unknown quality to a receiver who pays his expected value for it. Sender and receiver might hold different priors over quality. The sender commits to a monotonic categorization of quality. We characterize the…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2021-03-25 Paula Onuchic , Debraj Ray