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We study the optimal contract problem in the \emph{combinatorial actions} framework of D\"utting et al.~[FOCS'21], where a principal delegates a project to an agent who chooses a subset of hidden, costly actions, and the resulting reward is…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Michal Feldman , Liat Yashin

In the classical principal-agent problem, a principal must design a contract to incentivize an agent to perform an action on behalf of the principal. We study the classical principal-agent problem in a setting where the agent can be of one…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2020-10-15 Guru Guruganesh , Jon Schneider , Joshua Wang

Most microeconomic models of interest involve optimizing a piecewise linear function. These include contract design in hidden-action principal-agent problems, selling an item in posted-price auctions, and bidding in first-price auctions.…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Francesco Bacchiocchi , Matteo Castiglioni , Alberto Marchesi , Nicola Gatti

Optimal designs are usually model-dependent and likely to be sub-optimal if the postulated model is not correctly specified. In practice, it is common that a researcher has a list of candidate models at hand and a design has to be found…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2023-03-29 Mingyao Ai , Holger Dette , Zhengfu Liu , Jun Yu

Semantic segmentation has been widely investigated in the community, in which the state of the art techniques are based on supervised models. Those models have reported unprecedented performance at the cost of requiring a large set of high…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2022-01-11 Rihuan Ke , Angelica Aviles-Rivero , Saurabh Pandey , Saikumar Reddy , Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb

Pseudospectral analysis is fundamental for quantifying the sensitivity and transient behavior of nonnormal matrices, yet its computational cost scales cubically with dimension, rendering it prohibitive for large-scale systems. While…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2026-02-03 Vladimir R. Kostic , Dragana Lj. Cvetkovic , Ljiljana Cvetkovic

This paper explores the economic interactions within modern crowdsourcing markets. In these markets, employers issue requests for tasks, platforms facilitate the recruitment of crowd workers, and workers complete tasks for monetary rewards.…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Tian Bai , Yiding Feng , Yaohao Liu , Mengfan Ma , Mingyu Xiao

We study offline reinforcement learning under a novel model called strategic MDP, which characterizes the strategic interactions between a principal and a sequence of myopic agents with private types. Due to the bilevel structure and…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-08-24 Mengxin Yu , Zhuoran Yang , Jianqing Fan

The agency problem emerges in today's large scale machine learning tasks, where the learners are unable to direct content creation or enforce data collection. In this work, we propose a theoretical framework for aligning economic interests…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-03 Jibang Wu , Siyu Chen , Mengdi Wang , Huazheng Wang , Haifeng Xu

Learning is a complex dynamical process shaped by a range of interconnected decisions. Careful design of hyperparameter schedules for artificial neural networks or efficient allocation of cognitive resources by biological learners can…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2025-07-11 Francesca Mignacco , Francesco Mori

We study hidden-action principal-agent problems with multiple agents. These are problems in which a principal commits to an outcome-dependent payment scheme in order to incentivize some agents to take costly, unobservable actions that lead…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-02-01 Matteo Castiglioni , Alberto Marchesi , Nicola Gatti

We study a natural combinatorial single-principal multi-agent contract design problem, in which a principal motivates a team of agents to exert effort toward a given task. At the heart of our model is a reward function, which maps the agent…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Paul Duetting , Tomer Ezra , Michal Feldman , Thomas Kesselheim

Recent advances in semi-supervised learning (SSL) demonstrate that a combination of consistency regularization and pseudo-labeling can effectively improve image classification accuracy in the low-data regime. Compared to classification,…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2021-03-31 Yuliang Zou , Zizhao Zhang , Han Zhang , Chun-Liang Li , Xiao Bian , Jia-Bin Huang , Tomas Pfister

We study the problem of pure exploration in matching markets under uncertain preferences, where the goal is to identify a stable matching with confidence parameter $\delta$ and minimal sample complexity. Agents learn preferences via…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-09-19 Tejas Pagare , Agniv Bandyopadhyay , Sandeep Juneja

Firms have access to abundant data on market participants. They use these data to target contracts to agents with specific characteristics, and describe these contracts in opaque terms. In response to such practices, recent proposed…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2023-02-01 Andreas Haupt , Zoe Hitzig

We study optimal contract design for large populations of heterogeneous agents whose actions generate network spillovers represented by an interaction function. In a linear-quadratic framework, we solve the finite-agent problem and its…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-05-19 Guillermo Alonso Alvarez , Erhan Bayraktar , Ibrahim Ekren

The framework of budget-feasible mechanism design studies procurement auctions where the auctioneer (buyer) aims to maximize his valuation function subject to a hard budget constraint. We study the problem of designing truthful mechanisms…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2019-05-07 Georgios Amanatidis , Pieter Kleer , Guido Schäfer

Crowdsourcing markets have emerged as a popular platform for matching available workers with tasks to complete. The payment for a particular task is typically set by the task's requester, and may be adjusted based on the quality of the…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2015-09-03 Chien-Ju Ho , Aleksandrs Slivkins , Jennifer Wortman Vaughan

In this paper, we initiate the computational problem of jointly designing information and contracts. We consider three possible classes of contracts with decreasing flexibility and increasing simplicity: ambiguous contracts, menus of…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-07-09 Matteo Castiglioni , Junjie Chen

Stochastic optimization is a widely used approach for optimization under uncertainty, where uncertain input parameters are modeled by random variables. Exact or approximation algorithms have been obtained for several fundamental problems in…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-14 Arpit Agarwal , Rohan Ghuge , Viswanath Nagarajan , Zhengjia Zhuo