Related papers: A Taste for Variety
Recent work has shown that temporally extended actions (options) can be learned fully end-to-end as opposed to being specified in advance. While the problem of "how" to learn options is increasingly well understood, the question of "what"…
Agents that learn to select optimal actions represent a prominent focus of the sequential decision-making literature. In the face of a complex environment or constraints on time and resources, however, aiming to synthesize such an optimal…
This paper studies a dynamic screening model in which a principal hires an agent with limited liability. The agent's private cost of working is an i.i.d. draw from a continuous distribution. His working status is publicly observable. The…
We study the classic divide-and-choose method for equitably allocating divisible goods between two players who are rational, self-interested Bayesian agents. The players have additive values for the goods. The prior distributions on those…
We propose a variational method to solve all three estimation problems for nonlinear stochastic dynamical systems: prediction, filtering, and smoothing. Our new approach is based upon a proper choice of cost function, termed the {\it…
Recently, Press and Dyson have proposed a new class of probabilistic and conditional strategies for the two-player iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, so-called zero-determinant strategies. A player adopting zero-determinant strategies is able to…
We study a make-to-order system with a finite set of customers. Production is stochastic with a nonlinear dependence between the ordered quantity and the production rate. Customers may have to queue until their turn arrives, and therefore…
This paper considers an opportunistic scheduling problem over a renewal system. A controller observes a random event at the beginning of each renewal frame and then chooses an action in response to the event, which affects the duration of…
I study a repeated game in which a patient player (e.g., a seller) wants to win the trust of some myopic opponents (e.g., buyers) but can strictly benefit from betraying them. Her benefit from betrayal is strictly positive and is her…
A decision maker (DM) has some funds invested through two investment firms. She wishes to allocate additional funds according to the firms' earnings. The DM, on the one hand, tries to maximize the total expected earnings, while the firms,…
Strategic classification studies the problem where self-interested individuals or agents manipulate their response to obtain favorable decision outcomes made by classifiers, typically turning to dishonest actions when they are less costly…
For the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma, there exist Markov strategies which solve the problem when we restrict attention to the long term average payoff. When used by both players these assure the cooperative payoff for each of them. Neither…
In the best choice problem with random arrivals, an unknown number $n$ of rankable items arrive at times sampled from the uniform distribution. As is well known, a real-time player can ensure stopping at the overall best item with…
This paper considers online optimization for a system that performs a sequence of back-to-back tasks. Each task can be processed in one of multiple processing modes that affect the duration of the task, the reward earned, and an additional…
The long-run average payoff per transition (mean payoff) is the main tool for specifying the performance and dependability properties of discrete systems. The problem of constructing a controller (strategy) simultaneously optimizing several…
We introduce a novel theoretical framework for Return On Investment (ROI) maximization in repeated decision-making. Our setting is motivated by the use case of companies that regularly receive proposals for technological innovations and…
This paper studies decision problems where the decision maker's choice of action affects the probability distribution of a payoff relevant random variable. We establish sufficient conditions for the existence of an expected utility…
We consider partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) with limit-average payoff, where a reward value in the interval [0,1] is associated to every transition, and the payoff of an infinite path is the long-run average of the…
We consider the problem of a decision-maker searching for information on multiple alternatives when information is learned on all alternatives simultaneously. The decision-maker has a running cost of searching for information, and has to…
I consider the monopolistic pricing of informational good. A buyer's willingness to pay for information is from inferring the unknown payoffs of actions in decision making. A monopolistic seller and the buyer each observes a private signal…