Related papers: Strategic control for a Boltzmann like decision-ma…
In the last decade, stochastic models have shown to be very useful for quantitative modelling of social processes. Here, a configurational master equation for the description of behavioral changes by pair interactions of individuals is…
We study two stylized, multi-agent models aimed at investing a limited, indivisible resource in public transportation. In the first model, we face the decision of which potential stops to open along a (e.g., bus) path, given agents' travel…
Control of non-episodic, finite-horizon dynamical systems with uncertain dynamics poses a tough and elementary case of the exploration-exploitation trade-off. Bayesian reinforcement learning, reasoning about the effect of actions and future…
A kinetic inhomogeneous Boltzmann-type equation is proposed to model the dynamics of the number of agents in a large market depending on the estimated value of an asset and the rationality of the agents. The interaction rules take into…
Models of human behavior for prediction and collaboration tend to fall into two categories: ones that learn from large amounts of data via imitation learning, and ones that assume human behavior to be noisily-optimal for some reward…
This paper focuses on managing the cost of deliberation before action. In many problems, the overall quality of the solution reflects costs incurred and resources consumed in deliberation as well as the cost and benefit of execution, when…
This paper studies a model for the optimal control (by a centralized economic agent which we call the planner) of pollution diffusion over time and space. The controls are the investments in production and depollution and the goal is to…
We study an optimal investment/consumption problem in a model capturing market and credit risk dependencies. Stochastic factors drive both the default intensity and the volatility of the stocks in the portfolio. We use the martingale…
In this paper, we study the exploration / exploitation trade-off in cellular genetic algorithms. We define a new selection scheme, the centric selection, which is tunable and allows controlling the selective pressure with a single…
In this paper we study binary interaction schemes with uncertain parameters for a general class of Boltzmann-type equations with applications in classical gas and aggregation dynamics. We consider deterministic (i.e., a priori averaged) and…
A central push in operations models over the last decade has been the incorporation of models of customer choice. Real world implementations of many of these models face the formidable stumbling block of simply identifying the `right' model…
Advancing our understanding of human behavior hinges on the ability of theories to unveil the mechanisms underlying such behaviors. Measuring the ability of theories and models to predict unobserved behaviors provides a principled method to…
Under a Bayesian framework, we formulate the fully sequential sampling and selection decision in statistical ranking and selection as a stochastic control problem, and derive the associated Bellman equation. Using value function…
We propose a novel targeted exploration strategy designed specifically for uncertain linear time-invariant systems with energy-bounded disturbances, i.e., without any assumptions on the distribution of the disturbances. We use classical…
A perfectly rational decision-maker chooses the best action with the highest utility gain from a set of possible actions. The optimality principles that describe such decision processes do not take into account the computational costs of…
This paper analyzes and explicitly solves a class of long-term average impulse control problems and a related class of singular control problems. The underlying process is a general one-dimensional diffusion with appropriate boundary…
We describe a simple model of heterogeneous, interacting agents making decisions between $n\ge 2$ discrete choices. For a special class of interactions, our model is the mean field description of random-field Potts-like models, and is…
This paper investigates the optimal harvesting strategy for a single species living in random environments whose growth is given by a regime-switching diffusion. Harvesting acts as a (stochastic) control on the size of the population. The…
Multi-agent learning is a challenging problem in machine learning that has applications in different domains such as distributed control, robotics, and economics. We develop a prescriptive model of multi-agent behavior using Markov games.…
This paper proposes a strategic model of pollution control. A firm, representative of the productive sector of a country, aims at maximizing its profits by expanding its production. Assuming that the output of production is proportional to…