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Related papers: Welfare and Beyond in Multi-Agent Contracts

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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

We study a new class of contract design problems where a principal delegates the execution of multiple projects to a set of agents. The principal's expected reward from each project is a combinatorial function of the agents working on it.…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-06-09 Tal Alon , Matteo Castiglioni , Junjie Chen , Tomer Ezra , Yingkai Li , Inbal Talgam-Cohen

We study multi-agent contracts, in which a principal delegates a task to multiple agents and incentivizes them to exert effort. Prior research has mostly focused on maximizing the principal's utility, often resulting in highly disparate…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-01-26 Ke Ding , Bo Li , Ankang Sun

Research on promoting cooperation among autonomous, self-regarding agents has often focused on the bi-objective optimisation problem: minimising the total incentive cost while maximising the frequency of cooperation. However, the optimal…

In several socioeconomic-critical decision-making settings, such as fair resource allocation, climate policy, or AI alignment, multiple principals interact within a common arena. While it is well established that these principals may have…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-05-13 Sarvin Bahmani , Soumyajit Paul , Sven Schewe , Shadi Tasdighi Kalat , Ashutosh Trivedi

We study multi-agent contract design, where a principal incentivizes a team of agents to take costly actions that jointly determine the project success via a combinatorial reward function. While prior work largely focuses on unconstrained…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Michal Feldman , Yoav Gal-Tzur , Tomasz Ponitka , Maya Schlesinger

We study two combinatorial contract design models -- multi-agent and multi-action -- where a principal delegates the execution of a costly project to others. In both settings, the principal cannot observe the choices of the agent(s), only…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-12-01 Tomer Ezra , Michal Feldman , Maya Schlesinger

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

In the classical principal-agent hidden-action contract model, a principal delegates the execution of a costly task to an agent. In order to complete the task, the agent chooses an action from a set of actions, where each potential action…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-11-27 Tomer Ezra , Stefano Leonardi , Matteo Russo

We propose a new model for aggregating preferences over a set of indivisible items based on a quantile value. In this model, each agent is endowed with a specific quantile, and the value of a given bundle is defined by the corresponding…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-05-06 Haris Aziz , Shivika Narang , Mashbat Suzuki

The problem of computing near-optimal contracts in combinatorial settings has recently attracted significant interest in the computer science community. Previous work has provided a rich body of structural and algorithmic insights into this…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-06-26 Michal Feldman , Yoav Gal-Tzur , Tomasz Ponitka , Maya Schlesinger

In this paper, we study multi-agent systems with decentralized resource allocations. Agents have local demand and resource supply, and are interconnected through a network designed to support sharing of the local resource; and the network…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-03-25 Yijun Chen , Razibul Islam , Elizabeth Ratnam , Ian R. Petersen , Guodong Shi

We study a multi-agent contracting problem where agents exert costly effort to achieve individually observable binary outcomes. While the principal can theoretically extract the full social welfare using a discriminatory contract that…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Johannes Brustle , Paul Duetting , Stefano Leonardi , Tomasz Ponitka , Matteo Russo

We study the problem of allocating indivisible goods among $n$ agents with the objective of maximizing Nash social welfare (NSW). This welfare function is defined as the geometric mean of the agents' valuations and, hence, it strikes a…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-07-18 Siddharth Barman , Anand Krishna , Pooja Kulkarni , Shivika Narang

We study the role of regulatory inspections in a contract design problem in which a principal interacts separately with multiple agents. Each agent's hidden action includes a dimension that determines whether they undertake an extra costly…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-11-07 Alireza Fallah , Michael I. Jordan

We study the problem of allocating indivisible goods among agents in a fair and economically efficient manner. In this context, the Nash social welfare-defined as the geometric mean of agents' valuations for their assigned bundles-stands as…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2021-10-27 Siddharth Barman , Paritosh Verma

We study the fair allocation of indivisible items to $n$ agents to maximize the utilitarian social welfare, where the fairness criterion is envy-free up to one item and there are only two different utility functions shared by the agents. We…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-09-12 Jiaxuan Ma , Yong Chen , Guangting Chen , Mingyang Gong , Guohui Lin , An Zhang

We consider the problem of allocating multiple indivisible items to a set of networked agents to maximize the social welfare subject to network externalities. Here, the social welfare is given by the sum of agents' utilities and…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-08-29 S. Rasoul Etesami

A multiagent system may be thought of as an artificial society of autonomous software agents and we can apply concepts borrowed from welfare economics and social choice theory to assess the social welfare of such an agent society. In this…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2011-09-30 U. Endriss , N. Maudet , F. Sadri , F. Toni

Consider a setting where selfish agents are to be assigned to coalitions or projects from a fixed set P. Each project k is characterized by a valuation function; v_k(S) is the value generated by a set S of agents working on project k. We…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2015-08-28 Elliot Anshelevich , Shreyas Sekar
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