Related papers: Efficient Multi-Agent Delegated Search
We consider the general problem of geometric task allocation, wherein a large, decentralised swarm of simple mobile agents must detect the locations of tasks in the plane and position themselves nearby. The tasks are represented by an a…
Optimization problems in process engineering, including design and operation, can often pose challenges to many solvers: multi-modal, non-smooth, and discontinuous models often with large computational requirements. In such cases, the…
Despite the occurrence of elegant algorithms for solving complex problem, exhaustive search has retained its significance since many real-life problems exhibit no regular structure and exhaustive search is the only possible solution. The…
A principal can restrict an agent's information (the persuasion problem) or restrict an agent's discretion (the delegation problem). We show that these problems are generally equivalent - solving one solves the other. We use tools from the…
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…
This work considers a repeated principal-agent bandit game, where the principal can only interact with her environment through the agent. The principal and the agent have misaligned objectives and the choice of action is only left to the…
We study the role of regulatory inspections in a contract design problem in which a principal interacts separately with multiple agents. Each agent's hidden action includes a dimension that determines whether they undertake an extra costly…
A principal delegates decisions to a biased agent. Payoffs depend on a state that the principal cannot observe. Initially, the agent does not observe the state, but he can acquire information about it at a cost. We characterize the…
In the classical principal-agent hidden-action contract model, a principal delegates the execution of a costly task to an agent. In order to complete the task, the agent chooses an action from a set of actions, where each potential action…
A number of prototypical optimization problems in multi-agent systems (e.g., task allocation and network load-sharing) exhibit a highly local structure: that is, each agent's decision variables are only directly coupled to few other agent's…
We propose a distributed algorithm to solve a special distributed multi-resource allocation problem with no direct inter-agent communication. We do so by extending a recently introduced additive-increase multiplicative-decrease (AIMD)…
In the Seat Arrangement problem the goal is to allocate agents to vertices in a graph such that the resulting arrangement is optimal or fair in some way. Examples include an arrangement that maximises utility or one where no agent envies…
We consider a moral hazard problem with multiple principals in a continuous-time model. The agent can only work exclusively for one principal at a given time, so faces an optimal switching problem. Using a randomized formulation, we manage…
We study a natural application of contract design in the context of sequential exploration problems. In our principal-agent setting, a search task is delegated to an agent. The agent performs a sequential exploration of $n$ boxes, suffers…
In a facility game one or more facilities are placed in a metric space to serve a set of selfish agents whose addresses are their private information. In a classical facility game, each agent wants to be as close to a facility as possible,…
We show that, in many settings, the worst-case performance of a distributed optimization algorithm is independent of the number of agents in the system, and can thus be computed in the fundamental case with just two agents. This result…
Traditional approaches to the design of multi-agent navigation algorithms consider the environment as a fixed constraint, despite the influence of spatial constraints on agents' performance. Yet hand-designing conducive environment layouts…
Allocating scarce resources among agents to maximize global utility is, in general, computationally challenging. We focus on problems where resources enable agents to execute actions in stochastic environments, modeled as Markov decision…
We introduce a new model of combinatorial contracts in which a principal delegates the execution of a costly task to an agent. To complete the task, the agent can take any subset of a given set of unobservable actions, each of which has an…
In principal-agent models, a principal offers a contract to an agent to perform a certain task. The agent exerts a level of effort that maximizes her utility. The principal is oblivious to the agent's chosen level of effort, and conditions…