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The iterated prisoner's dilemma is a game that produces many counter-intuitive and complex behaviors in a social environment, based on very simple basic rules. It illustrates that cooperation can be a good thing even in a competitive world,…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2020-09-07 Robert Prentner

Environments with fixed adjustment costs such as transaction costs or \lq menu costs\rq$ $ are widespread within economic systems. The presence of fixed minimal adjustment costs produces adjustment stickiness so that agents must choose a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-10-09 David Mguni

Employers are concerned not only with a prospective worker's ability, but also their propensity to avoid shirking. This paper proposes a new experimental framework to study how Principals trade-off measures of ability and prosocial behavior…

General Economics · Economics 2025-11-03 Andrew Leal

We consider sequential search by an agent who cannot observe the quality of goods but can acquire information by buying signals from a profit-maximizing principal with limited commitment power. The principal can charge higher prices for…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2024-08-13 Teddy Mekonnen , Zeky Murra-Anton , Bobak Pakzad-Hurson

We all have preferences when multiple choices are available. If we insist on satisfying our preferences only, we may suffer a loss due to conflicts with other people's identical selections. Such a case applies when the choice cannot be…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2023-02-21 Hiroaki Shinkawa , Nicolas Chauvet , Guillaume Bachelier , André Röhm , Ryoichi Horisaki , Makoto Naruse

We study the emergence of cooperative behaviors in reinforcement learning agents by introducing a challenging competitive multi-agent soccer environment with continuous simulated physics. We demonstrate that decentralized, population-based…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-05-21 Siqi Liu , Guy Lever , Josh Merel , Saran Tunyasuvunakool , Nicolas Heess , Thore Graepel

We explore the deliberate infusion of ambiguity into the design of contracts. We show that when the agent is ambiguity-averse and hence chooses an action that maximizes their minimum utility, the principal can strictly gain from using an…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-09-17 Paul Dütting , Michal Feldman , Daniel Peretz , Larry Samuelson

I introduce a model of predictive scoring. A receiver wants to predict a sender's quality. An intermediary observes multiple features of the sender and aggregates them into a score. Based on the score, the receiver makes a decision. The…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2024-05-17 Ian Ball

Algorithmic decision making is increasingly prevalent, but often vulnerable to strategic manipulation by agents seeking a favorable outcome. Prior research has shown that classifier abstention (allowing a classifier to decline making a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-03 Lina Alkarmi , Ziyuan Huang , Mingyan Liu

A principal uses payments conditioned on stochastic outcomes of a team project to elicit costly effort from the team members. We develop a multi-agent generalization of a classic first-order approach to contract optimization by leveraging…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-03-13 Krishna Dasaratha , Benjamin Golub , Anant Shah

We study online learning settings in which experts act strategically to maximize their influence on the learning algorithm's predictions by potentially misreporting their beliefs about a sequence of binary events. Our goal is twofold.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-07-02 Rupert Freeman , David M. Pennock , Chara Podimata , Jennifer Wortman Vaughan

We construct a model of expert prediction where predictions can influence the state of the world. Under this model, we show through theoretical and numerical results that proper scoring rules can incentivize experts to manipulate the world…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-07-08 Alan Chan

A principal selects a team of agents for collaborating on a joint project. The principal aims to design a revenue-optimal contract that incentivize the team of agents to exert costly effort while satisfying fairness constraints. We show…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Matteo Castiglioni , Junjie Chen , Yingkai Li

When multiple informative equilibria are possible in a general cheap talk game, how much information can a principal guarantee herself? To answer this question, I define the notion of worst-case implementation-implementation via the worst…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-02-17 Andrei Iakovlev

In this paper, we consider the problem of a Principal aiming at designing a reward function for a population of heterogeneous agents. We construct an incentive based on the ranking of the agents, so that a competition among the latter is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-28 Clémence Alasseur , Erhan Bayraktar , Roxana Dumitrescu , Quentin Jacquet

We study the problem of learning the utility functions of no-regret learning agents in a repeated normal-form game. Differing from most prior literature, we introduce a principal with the power to observe the agents playing the game, send…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Brian Hu Zhang , Tao Lin , Yiling Chen , Tuomas Sandholm

In dynamic mechanism design literature, one critical aspect has been typically ignored-the agents' periodic participation, which they can adapt and plan strategically. We propose a framework for dynamic principal-multiagent problems,…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-06-16 Tao Zhang , Quanyan Zhu

We study a dynamic model of Bayesian persuasion in sequential decision-making settings. An informed principal observes an external parameter of the world and advises an uninformed agent about actions to take over time. The agent takes…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-05-25 Jiarui Gan , Rupak Majumdar , Goran Radanovic , Adish Singla

Modern recommendation systems rely on the wisdom of the crowd to learn the optimal course of action. This induces an inherent mis-alignment of incentives between the system's objective to learn (explore) and the individual users' objective…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2018-07-06 Gal Bahar , Rann Smorodinsky , Moshe Tennenholtz

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