Related papers: When Should a Principal Delegate to an Agent in Se…
Revealed preference theory studies the possibility of modeling an agent's revealed preferences and the construction of a consistent utility function. However, modeling agent's choices over preference orderings is not always practical and…
To better understand discriminations and the effect of affirmative actions in selection problems (e.g., college admission or hiring), a recent line of research proposed a model based on differential variance. This model assumes that the…
As AI-mediated learning systems increasingly shape how learners plan, make decisions, and progress through education, learner agency is becoming both more consequential and harder to conceptualize at scale. Existing research often treats…
Machine learning algorithms often make decisions on behalf of agents with varied and sometimes conflicting interests. In domains where agents can choose to take their own action or delegate their action to a central mediator, an open…
A principal hires an agent to work on a long-term project that culminates in a breakthrough or a breakdown. At each time, the agent privately chooses to work or shirk. Working increases the arrival rate of breakthroughs and decreases the…
This paper considers the scenario in which there are multiple institutions, each with a limited capacity for candidates, and candidates, each with preferences over the institutions. A central entity evaluates the utility of each candidate…
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…
A broad current application of algorithms is in formal and quantitative measures of murky concepts -- like merit -- to make decisions. When people strategically respond to these sorts of evaluations in order to gain favorable decision…
We consider the problem of creating assistants that can help agents solve new sequential decision problems, assuming the agent is not able to specify the reward function explicitly to the assistant. Instead of acting in place of the agent…
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…
This paper studies the optimal mechanism to motivate effort in a dynamic principal-agent model without transfers. An agent is engaged in a task with uncertain future rewards and can quit at any time. The principal knows the reward and…
We study vote delegation with "well-behaving" and "misbehaving" agents and compare it with conventional voting. Typical examples for vote delegation are validation or governance tasks on blockchains. There is a majority of well-behaving…
Consider a university assigning students to courses and dorms. While many mechanisms are available, they each have their own drawbacks. Running serial dictatorship once for all goods is highly unfair, but running serial dictatorship…
I study a moral hazard problem between a principal and multiple agents who experience positive peer effects represented by a (weighted) network. Under the optimal linear contract, the principal provides high-powered incentives to central…
A principal delegates choice to an agent whose decision depends on both beliefs and tastes. The principal can steer the delegated decision using two costly instruments: (i) an information policy that determines a Bayes--plausible…
To successfully navigate its environment, an agent must construct and maintain representations of the other agents that it encounters. Such representations are useful for many tasks, but they are not without cost. As a result, agents must…
Undesired bias afflicts both human and algorithmic decision making, and may be especially prevalent when information processing trade-offs incentivize the use of heuristics. One primary example is \textit{statistical discrimination} --…
A designer offers vertically-differentiated positions to agents in the absence of transfers. Agents have private outside options and may reject their offers ex-post. The designer has preferences over the quantity of agents who accept each…
We study the design of effort-maximizing grading schemes between agents with private abilities. Assuming agents derive value from the information their grade reveals about their ability, we find that more informative grading schemes induce…
Preference elicitation explicitly asks users what kind of recommendations they would like to receive. It is a popular technique for conversational recommender systems to deal with cold-starts. Previous work has studied selection bias in…