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Related papers: Multi-Agent Combinatorial Contracts

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This paper describes a study of agent bidding strategies, assuming combinatorial valuations for complementary and substitutable goods, in three auction environments: sequential auctions, simultaneous auctions, and the Trading Agent…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2012-07-19 Amy Greenwald , Justin Boyan

Recently there has been a large amount of research designing mechanisms for auction scenarios where the bidders are connected in a social network. Different from the existing studies in this field that focus on specific auction scenarios…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-08-09 Yuan Fang , Mengxiao Zhang , Jiamou Liu , Bakh Khoussainov

In this paper, we consider a problem of contract theory in which several Principals hire a common Agent and we study the model in the continuous time setting. We show that optimal contracts should satisfy some equilibrium conditions and we…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-01-15 Thibaut Mastrolia , Zhenjie Ren

We study a multi-agent contracting problem where agents exert costly effort to achieve individually observable binary outcomes. While the principal can theoretically extract the full social welfare using a discriminatory contract that…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Johannes Brustle , Paul Duetting , Stefano Leonardi , Tomasz Ponitka , Matteo Russo

Consider a dynamic task allocation problem, where tasks are unknowingly distributed over an environment. This paper considers each task comprised of two sequential subtasks: detection and completion, where each subtask can only be carried…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2020-03-30 Mehdi Dadvar , Saeed Moazami , Harley R. Myler , Hassan Zargarzadeh

Many potential applications of reinforcement learning in the real world involve interacting with other agents whose numbers vary over time. We propose new neural policy architectures for these multi-agent problems. In contrast to other…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-03 Matthew A. Wright , Roberto Horowitz

We study optimal contract design for large populations of heterogeneous agents whose actions generate network spillovers represented by an interaction function. In a linear-quadratic framework, we solve the finite-agent problem and its…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-05-19 Guillermo Alonso Alvarez , Erhan Bayraktar , Ibrahim Ekren

This paper introduces a federated learning framework tailored for online combinatorial optimization with bandit feedback. In this setting, agents select subsets of arms, observe noisy rewards for these subsets without accessing individual…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-10 Fares Fourati , Mohamed-Slim Alouini , Vaneet Aggarwal

This work studies the online contract design problem. The principal's goal is to learn the optimal contract that maximizes her utility through repeated interactions, without prior knowledge of the agent's type (i.e., the agent's cost and…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Shiliang Zuo

Iterative combinatorial auctions are widely used in high stakes settings such as spectrum auctions. Such auctions can be hard to analyze, making it difficult for bidders to determine how to behave and for designers to optimize auction rules…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-07-25 Greg d'Eon , Neil Newman , Kevin Leyton-Brown

We study a principal-agent team production model. The principal hires a team of agents to participate in a common production task. The exact effort of each agent is unobservable and unverifiable, but the total production outcome (e.g. the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Shiliang Zuo

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…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-01-12 Halil I. Bayrak , Martin Bichler

Combinatorial Auctions are a central problem in Algorithmic Mechanism Design: pricing and allocating goods to buyers with complex preferences in order to maximize some desired objective (e.g., social welfare, revenue, or profit). The…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2015-03-19 Avrim Blum , Anupam Gupta , Yishay Mansour , Ankit Sharma

In multi-agent reinforcement learning systems, the actions of one agent can have a negative impact on the rewards of other agents. One way to combat this problem is to let agents trade their rewards amongst each other. Motivated by this,…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-07-25 Michael Kölle , Lennart Rietdorf , Kyrill Schmid

We study the communication complexity of dominant strategy implementations of combinatorial auctions. We start with two domains that are generally considered "easy": multi-unit auctions with decreasing marginal values and combinatorial…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-06-02 Shahar Dobzinski , Shiri Ron , Jan Vondrák

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

In the classical principal-agent problem, a principal must design a contract to incentivize an agent to perform an action on behalf of the principal. We study the classical principal-agent problem in a setting where the agent can be of one…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2020-10-15 Guru Guruganesh , Jon Schneider , Joshua Wang

We study principal-agent problems in which a principal commits to an outcome-dependent payment scheme (a.k.a. contract) so as to induce an agent to take a costly, unobservable action. We relax the assumption that the principal perfectly…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2021-06-02 Matteo Castiglioni , Alberto Marchesi , Nicola Gatti

Dynamic contracts with multiple agents is a classical decentralized decision-making problem with asymmetric information. In this paper, we extend the single-agent dynamic incentive contract model in continuous-time to a multi-agent scheme…

Econometrics · Economics 2017-10-10 Qi Luo , Romesh Saigal

Algorithmic contract design studies scenarios where a principal incentivizes an agent to exert effort on her behalf. In this work, we focus on settings where the agent's type is drawn from an unknown distribution, and formalize an offline…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-01-27 Paul Duetting , Michal Feldman , Tomasz Ponitka , Ermis Soumalias