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Related papers: Optimal Robust Contract Design

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A large fraction of total healthcare expenditure occurs due to end-of-life (EOL) care, which means it is important to study the problem of more carefully incentivizing necessary versus unnecessary EOL care because this has the potential to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-03-25 Muyan Jiang , Ying Chen , Xin Chen , Javad Lavaei , Anil Aswani

With the rise of emerging risks, model uncertainty poses a fundamental challenge in the insurance industry, making robust pricing a first-order question. This paper investigates how insurers' robustness preferences shape competitive…

Risk Management · Quantitative Finance 2025-10-20 Shunzhi Pang

I study whether and which expert incentives can be provided at what cost when the states of the world become non-contractible, but there is some noisy observation about the states that can be contracted upon. A principal hires an agent to…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-11-12 Zizhe Xia

AI systems will soon have to navigate human environments and make decisions that affect people and other AI agents whose goals and values diverge. Contractualist alignment proposes grounding those decisions in agreements that diverse…

The increasing deployment of AI is shaping the future landscape of the internet, which is set to become an integrated ecosystem of AI agents. Orchestrating the interaction among AI agents necessitates decentralized, self-sustaining…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Dima Ivanov , Paul Dütting , Inbal Talgam-Cohen , Tonghan Wang , David C. Parkes

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

We consider the optimal reinsurance problem from the point of view of a direct insurer owning several dependent risks, assuming a maximal expected utility criterion and independent negotiation of reinsurance for each risk. Without any…

Probability · Mathematics 2021-06-16 Manuel Guerra , Alexandra B. Moura

There is a movement in design of experiments away from the classic randomization put forward by Fisher, Cochran and others to one based on optimization. In fixed-sample trials comparing two groups, measurements of subjects are known in…

Methodology · Statistics 2018-10-22 Adam Kapelner , Abba M. Krieger , Uri Shalit , David Azriel

Contract scheduling is a general technique that allows to design a system with interruptible capabilities, given an algorithm that is not necessarily interruptible. Previous work on this topic has largely assumed that the interruption is a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-11-26 Spyros Angelopoulos , Shahin Kamali

A reinforcement learning agent tries to maximize its cumulative payoff by interacting in an unknown environment. It is important for the agent to explore suboptimal actions as well as to pick actions with highest known rewards. Yet, in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-01-23 Reazul Hasan Russel

This paper studies continuous-time optimal contracting in a hierarchy problem which generalises the model of Sung (2015). The hierarchy is modeled by a series of interlinked principal-agent problems, leading to a sequence of Stackelberg…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-07-22 Emma Hubert

We study the mechanism design problem of selling a public good to a group of agents by a principal in the correlated private value environment. We assume the principal only knows the expectations of the agents' values, but does not know the…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2022-01-06 Wanchang Zhang

Robust reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find a policy that optimizes the worst-case performance in the face of uncertainties. In this paper, we focus on action robust RL with the probabilistic policy execution uncertainty, in which,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-07-21 Guanlin Liu , Zhihan Zhou , Han Liu , Lifeng Lai

The goal of robust constrained reinforcement learning (RL) is to optimize an agent's performance under the worst-case model uncertainty while satisfying safety or resource constraints. In this paper, we demonstrate that strong duality does…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Shaocong Ma , Ziyi Chen , Yi Zhou , Heng Huang

This paper presents a novel distributed robust optimization scheme for steering distributions of multi-agent systems under stochastic and deterministic uncertainty. Robust optimization is a subfield of optimization which aims to discover an…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-01-31 Arshiya Taj Abdul , Augustinos D. Saravanos , Evangelos A. Theodorou

We study an exit contract design problem, where one provides a universal exit contract to multiple heterogeneous agents, with which each agent chooses an optimal (exit) stopping time. The problem consists in optimizing the universal exit…

Probability · Mathematics 2024-07-02 Xihao He , Xiaolu Tan , Jun Zou

We study a variant of the principal-agent problem in which the principal does not directly observe the agent's effort outcome; rather, she gets a signal about the agent's action according to a variable information structure designed by a…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-09-06 Yakov Babichenko , Inbal Talgam-Cohen , Haifeng Xu , Konstantin Zabarnyi

We consider the fundamental problem of designing a truthful single-item auction with the challenging objective of extracting a large fraction of the highest agent valuation as revenue. Following a recent trend in algorithm design, we assume…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-01-25 Ioannis Caragiannis , Georgios Kalantzis

While $\mathcal{H}_\infty$ methods can introduce robustness against worst-case perturbations, their nominal performance under conventional stochastic disturbances is often drastically reduced. Though this fundamental tradeoff between…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-03-22 Bruce D. Lee , Thomas T. C. K. Zhang , Hamed Hassani , Nikolai Matni

In high-stakes engineering applications, optimization algorithms must come with provable worst-case guarantees over a mathematically defined class of problems. Designing for the worst case, however, inevitably sacrifices performance on the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-08-04 Andrea Martin , Ian R. Manchester , Luca Furieri