Related papers: When Should a Principal Delegate to an Agent in Se…
We study the principal-agent problem with a third party that we call social planner, whose responsibility is to reconcile the conflicts of interest between the two players and induce socially optimal outcome in terms of some given social…
We consider the mechanism design problem of a principal allocating a single good to one of several agents without monetary transfers. Each agent desires the good and uses it to create value for the principal. We designate this value as the…
Preference elicitation is a central problem in AI, and has received significant attention in single-agent settings. It is also a key problem in multiagent systems, but has received little attention here so far. In this setting, the agents…
Over the past two decades, the notion of implicit bias has come to serve as an important component in our understanding of discrimination in activities such as hiring, promotion, and school admissions. Research on implicit bias posits that…
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…
We study secretary problems in settings with multiple agents. In the standard secretary problem, a sequence of arbitrary awards arrive online, in a random order, and a single decision maker makes an immediate and irrevocable decision…
We introduce an agent-based model of delegation relationships between a principal and an agent, which is based on the standard-hidden action model introduced by Holmstr\"om and, by doing so, provide a model which can be used to further…
In the conventional principal-agent problem, a principal delegates a task to an agent and formulates a contract to incentivize the agent's actions on behalf of the principal. However, this framework overlooks the information that is…
Why do some investors delegate financial decisions to supposed experts? We report a laboratory experiment designed to disentangle four possible motives. Almost 600 investors drawn from the Prolific subject pool choose whether or not to…
We study hidden-action principal-agent problems in which a principal commits to an outcome-dependent payment scheme (called contract) so as to incentivize the agent to take a costly, unobservable action leading to favorable outcomes. In…
In this paper, we consider a general distributed system with multiple agents who select and then implement actions in the system. The system has an operator with a centralized objective. The agents, on the other hand, are selfinterested and…
It is often argued that an agent making decisions on behalf of two or more principals who have different utility functions should adopt a {\em Pareto-optimal} policy, i.e., a policy that cannot be improved upon for one agent without making…
Liquid democracy is a novel paradigm for collective decision-making that gives agents the choice between casting a direct vote or delegating their vote to another agent. We consider a generalization of the standard liquid democracy setting…
We introduce a stochastic principal-agent model. A principal and an agent interact in a stochastic environment, each privy to observations about the state not available to the other. The principal has the power of commitment, both to elicit…
Strategic classification studies the problem where self-interested individuals or agents manipulate their response to obtain favorable decision outcomes made by classifiers, typically turning to dishonest actions when they are less costly…
We study the problem of selecting a member of a set of agents based on impartial nominations by agents from that set. The problem was studied previously by Alon et al. and Holzman and Moulin and has important applications in situations…
We study a principal-agent problem with adverse selection, where the principal does not know the agent's true cost but must design a contract to optimize a specific criterion. Unlike standard screening frameworks that allow for…
We examine hypothesis testing within a principal-agent framework, where a strategic agent, holding private beliefs about the effectiveness of a product, submits data to a principal who decides on approval. The principal employs a hypothesis…
We study the problem of selection in the context of Bayesian persuasion. We are given multiple agents with hidden values (or quality scores), to whom resources must be allocated by a welfare-maximizing decision-maker. An intermediary with…
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…