Related papers: Tournaments with a Standard
Recent technology advances have enabled firms to flexibly process and analyze sophisticated employee performance data at a reduced and yet significant cost. We develop a theory of optimal incentive contracting where the monitoring…
We consider the classic principal-agent model of contract theory, in which a principal designs an outcome-dependent compensation scheme to incentivize an agent to take a costly and unobservable action. When all of the model…
We introduce a dynamic mechanism design problem in which the designer wants to offer for sale an item to an agent, and another item to the same agent at some point in the future. The agent's joint distribution of valuations for the two…
Consider a group of effort-averse, or lazy, sensors that seek to minimize the effort invested to collect measurements of a variable. Increasing the effort invested by the sensors improves the quality of the measurements provided to the…
Stochastic games are often used to model reactive processes. We consider the problem of synthesizing an optimal almost-sure winning strategy in a two-player (namely a system and its environment) turn-based stochastic game with both a…
In this paper,we consider the restless bandit problem, which is one of the most well-studied generalizations of the celebrated stochastic multi-armed bandit problem in decision theory. However, it is known be PSPACE-Hard to approximate to…
We study the design of optimal allocation mechanisms in an environment where agents and goods arrive stochastically. Agents have private types that determine the principal payoff. Either agents or goods can be held in a queue at a flow cost…
The fair allocation of scarce resources is a central problem in mathematics, computer science, operations research, and economics. While much of the fair-division literature assumes that individuals have underlying cardinal preferences,…
Efficient resource allocation and scheduling algorithms are essential for various distributed applications, ranging from wireless networks and cloud computing platforms to autonomous multi-agent systems and swarm robotic networks. However,…
In many social computing applications such as online Q&A forums, the best contribution for each task receives some high reward, while all remaining contributions receive an identical, lower reward irrespective of their actual qualities.…
We consider a decentralized stochastic multi-armed bandit problem with multiple players. Each player aims to maximize his/her own reward by pulling an arm. The arms give rewards based on i.i.d. stochastic Bernoulli distributions. Players…
Robbins' problem of optimal stopping asks one to minimise the expected {\it rank} of observation chosen by some nonanticipating stopping rule. We settle a conjecture regarding the {\it value} of the stopped variable under the rule optimal…
We examine perfect information stochastic mean-payoff games - a class of games containing as special sub-classes the usual mean-payoff games and parity games. We show that deterministic memoryless strategies that are optimal for discounted…
Ranking is a ubiquitous phenomenon in the human society. By clicking the web pages of Forbes, you may find all kinds of rankings, such as world's most powerful people, world's richest people, top-paid tennis stars, and so on and so forth.…
We consider the minimum spanning tree problem in a setting where the edge weights are stochastic from unknown distributions, and the only available information is a single sample of each edge's weight distribution. In this setting, we…
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…
We study the problem of assigning indivisible objects to agents where each is to receive at most one. To ensure fairness in the absence of monetary compensation, we consider random assignments. Random Priority, also known as Random Serial…
Our model describes competition between groups driven by the choices of self-interested voters within groups. Within a Poisson voting environment, parties observe aggregate support from groups and can allocate prizes or punishments to them.…
We formulate a stochastic game of mean field type where the agents solve optimal stopping problems and interact through the proportion of players that have already stopped. Working with a continuum of agents, typical equilibria become…
This paper studies the design of optimal proper scoring rules when the principal has partial knowledge of an agent's signal distribution. Recent work characterizes the proper scoring rules that maximize the increase of an agent's payoff…