Related papers: Subsidy design for better social outcomes

Human behavioural patterns exhibit selfish or competitive, as well as selfless or altruistic tendencies, both of which have demonstrable effects on human social and economic activity. In behavioural economics, such effects have…

Organizations consist of individuals connected by their responsibilities, incentives, and reporting structure. These connections are aptly represented by a network, hierarchical or other, which is often used to divide tasks. A primary goal…

AI agents will be predictable in certain ways that traditional agents are not. Where and how can we leverage this predictability in order to improve social welfare? We study this question in a game-theoretic setting where one agent can pay…

When users lack specific knowledge of various system parameters, their uncertainty may lead them to make undesirable deviations in their decision making. To alleviate this, an informed system operator may elect to signal information to…

Strategic uncertainty complicates policy design in coordination games. To rein in strategic uncertainty, the Planner in this paper connects the problem of policy design to that of equilibrium selection. We characterize the subsidy scheme…

We investigate the mechanism design problem faced by a principal who hires \emph{multiple} agents to gather and report costly information. Then, the principal exploits the information to make an informed decision. We model this problem as a…

One common assumption in game theory is that any player optimizes a utility function that takes into account only its own payoff. However, it has long been observed that in real life players may adopt an altruistic or even spiteful…

The reliability and security of a user in an interconnected system depends on all users' collective effort in security. Consequently, investments in security technologies by strategic users is typically modeled as a public good problem,…

In the future, artificial learning agents are likely to become increasingly widespread in our society. They will interact with both other learning agents and humans in a variety of complex settings including social dilemmas. We consider the…

The strategic selection of resources by selfish agents is a classic research direction, with Resource Selection Games and Congestion Games as prominent examples. In these games, agents select available resources and their utility then…

We apply control theoretic and optimization techniques to adaptively design incentives. In particular, we consider the problem of a planner with an objective that depends on data from strategic decision makers. The planner does not know the…

Consequential decision-making incentivizes individuals to strategically adapt their behavior to the specifics of the decision rule. While a long line of work has viewed strategic adaptation as gaming and attempted to mitigate its effects,…

Mechanism design is essentially reverse engineering of games and involves inducing a game among strategic agents in a way that the induced game satisfies a set of desired properties in an equilibrium of the game. Desirable properties for a…

How can a social planner adaptively incentivize selfish agents who are learning in a strategic environment to induce a socially optimal outcome in the long run? We propose a two-timescale learning dynamics to answer this question in both…

A basic lesson from game theory is that strategic behavior often renders the equilibrium outcome inefficient. The recent literature of information design -- a.k.a. signaling or persuasion -- looks to improve equilibria by providing…

Game theory serves as a powerful tool for distributed optimization in multi-agent systems in different applications. In this paper we consider multi-agent systems that can be modeled by means of potential games whose potential function…

Network congestion games are a well-understood model of multi-agent strategic interactions. Despite their ubiquitous applications, it is not clear whether it is possible to design information structures to ameliorate the overall experience…

We propose a generic mechanism for incentivizing behavior in an arbitrary finite game using payments. Doing so is trivial if the mechanism is allowed to observe all actions taken in the game, as this allows it to simply punish those agents…

Models of economic decision makers often include idealized assumptions, such as rationality, perfect foresight, and access to all relevant pieces of information. These assumptions often assure the models' internal validity, but, at the same…

Machine learning relies on the assumption that unseen test instances of a classification problem follow the same distribution as observed training data. However, this principle can break down when machine learning is used to make important…