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Related papers: Incentivizing Information Acquisition

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This paper considers the hidden-action model of the principal-agent problem, in which a principal incentivizes an agent to work on a project using a contract. We investigate whether contracts with bounded payments are learnable and…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-02-23 Yurong Chen , Zhaohua Chen , Xiaotie Deng , Zhiyi Huang

Agents are systems that optimize an objective function in an environment. Together, the goal and the environment induce secondary objectives, incentives. Modeling the agent-environment interaction using causal influence diagrams, we can…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2022-01-21 Tom Everitt , Pedro A. Ortega , Elizabeth Barnes , Shane Legg

We consider a crowdsourcing data acquisition scenario, such as federated learning, where a Center collects data points from a set of rational Agents, with the aim of training a model. For linear regression models, we show how a payment…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-09-02 Adam Richardson , Aris Filos-Ratsikas , Boi Faltings

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 present our approach to the problem of how an agent, within an economic Multi-Agent System, can determine when it should behave strategically (i.e. learn and use models of other agents), and when it should act as a simple price-taker. We…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2007-05-23 Jose M. Vidal , Edmund H. Durfee

We study information design settings where the designer controls information about a state, and there are multiple agents interacting in a game who are privately informed about their types. Each agent's utility depends on all agents' types…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2022-01-31 Ozan Candogan , Philipp Strack

We develop an overlapping generations model where each agent observes a verifiable private signal about the state and, with positive probability, also receives signals disclosed by his predecessor. The agent then takes an action and decides…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-02-26 Nemanja Antic , Harry Pei

We study a sender-receiver model in which the receiver can commit to a decision rule before the sender determines the information policy. The decision rule can depend on the information structure chosen by the sender and the realized…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-12-19 Dirk Bergemann , Tan Gan , Yingkai Li

When a new product or technology is introduced, potential consumers can learn its quality by trying the product, at a risk, or by letting others try it and free-riding on the information that they generate. We propose a dynamic game to…

Economics · Quantitative Finance 2017-06-27 Matt V. Leduc , Matthew O. Jackson , Ramesh Johari

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

I study dynamic contracting where Sender privately observes a Markovian state and seeks to motivate Receiver, who acts. Sender provides incentives in two ways: payments, which alter payoffs ex-post, and (Bayesian) persuasion, which shapes…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-05-22 Daniel Luo

Imitation is widely observed in populations of decision-making agents. Using our recent convergence results for asynchronous imitation dynamics on networks, we consider how such networks can be efficiently driven to a desired equilibrium…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2017-04-17 James Riehl , Pouria Ramazi , Ming Cao

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-23 Dilip Arumugam , Benjamin Van Roy

Humans and animals explore their environment and acquire useful skills even in the absence of clear goals, exhibiting intrinsic motivation. The study of intrinsic motivation in artificial agents is concerned with the following question:…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-12-08 Nicholas Rhinehart , Jenny Wang , Glen Berseth , John D. Co-Reyes , Danijar Hafner , Chelsea Finn , Sergey Levine

Agents receive private signals about an unknown state. The resulting joint belief distributions are complex and lack a simple characterization. Our key insight is that, when conditioned on the state, the structure of belief distributions…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2024-11-19 Itai Arieli , Yakov Babichenko , Fedor Sandomirskiy

Persuasion studies how an informed principal may influence the behavior of agents by the strategic provision of payoff-relevant information. We focus on the fundamental multi-receiver model by Arieli and Babichenko (2019), in which there…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2020-04-01 Matteo Castiglioni , Andrea Celli , Nicola Gatti

We study a simple problem of allocating common-value goods. The designer seeks to allocate the goods to as many unit-demand agents as possible without monetary transfers, while agents, who possess partial private information about the…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-04-22 Hiroto Sato , Ryo Shirakawa

We examine the strategic interaction between an expert (principal) maximizing engagement and an agent seeking swift information. Our analysis reveals: When priors align, relative patience determines optimal disclosure -- impatient agents…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2024-07-30 Maryam Saeedi , Yikang Shen , Ali Shourideh

We consider the fundamental scenario where a single item is to be sold to one of two agents. Both agents draw their valuation for the item from the same probability distribution. However, only one of them submits a bid to the mechanism. The…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-08-26 Ioannis Caragiannis , Georgios Kalantzis

Motivated by applications in cyber security, we develop a simple game model for describing how a learning agent's private information influences an observing agent's inference process. The model describes a situation in which one of the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2019-09-16 Erik Miehling , Roy Dong , Cédric Langbort , Tamer Başar