Related papers: Welfare and Beyond in Multi-Agent Contracts
We consider the problem of designing auctions which maximize consumer surplus (i.e., the social welfare minus the payments charged to the buyers). In the consumer surplus maximization problem, a seller with a set of goods faces a set of…
We consider the problem of maximizing the Nash social welfare when allocating a set $\mathcal{G}$ of indivisible goods to a set $\mathcal{N}$ of agents. We study instances, in which all agents have 2-value additive valuations: The value of…
Modern AI systems increasingly operate inside markets and institutions where data, behavior, and incentives are endogenous. This paper develops an economic foundation for multi-agent learning by studying a principal-agent interaction in a…
We study the problem of allocating indivisible goods among agents with additive valuation functions to achieve both fairness and efficiency under the constraint that each agent receives exactly the same number of goods (the \emph{balanced…
Strategic learning studies how decision rules interact with agents who may strategically change their inputs/features to achieve better outcomes. In standard settings, models assume that the decision-maker's sole scope is to learn a…
The two standard fairness notions in the resource allocation literature are proportionality and envy-freeness. If there are n agents competing for the available resources, then proportionality requires that each agent receives at least a…
We analyze a model of selling a single object to a principal-agent pair who want to acquire the object for a firm. The principal and the agent have different assessments of the object's value to the firm. The agent is budget-constrained…
Incentives are more likely to elicit desired outcomes when they are designed based on accurate models of agents' strategic behavior. A growing literature, however, suggests that people do not quite behave like standard economic agents in a…
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…
One of the important yet insufficiently studied subjects in fair allocation is the externality effect among agents. For a resource allocation problem, externalities imply that a bundle allocated to an agent may affect the utilities of other…
A principal provides nondiscriminatory incentives for independent and identical agents. The principal cannot observe the agents' actions, nor does she know the entire set of actions available to them. It is shown, very generally, that any…
In this paper we study the problem of allocating a scarce resource among several players (or agents). A central decision maker wants to maximize the total utility of all agents. However, such a solution may be unfair for one or more agents…
Linear contracts are ubiquitous in practice, yet optimal contract theory often prescribes complex, nonlinear structures. We provide a distributional robustness justification for linear contracts. We study a principal-agent problem where the…
We provide a reduction from revenue maximization to welfare maximization in multi-dimensional Bayesian auctions with arbitrary (possibly combinatorial) feasibility constraints and independent bidders with arbitrary (possibly combinatorial)…
We study a temporal voting model where voters have dynamic preferences over a set of public chores -- projects that benefit society, but impose individual costs on those affected by their implementation. We investigate the computational…
A major problem in fair division is how to allocate a set of indivisible resources among agents fairly and efficiently. The goal of this work is to characterize the tradeoffs between two well-studied measures of fairness and efficiency --…
We explore solutions for fairly allocating indivisible items among agents assigned weights representing their entitlements. Our fairness goal is weighted-envy-freeness (WEF), where each agent deems their allocated portion relative to their…
In the allocation of resources to a set of agents, how do fairness guarantees impact the social welfare? A quantitative measure of this impact is the price of fairness, which measures the worst-case loss of social welfare due to fairness…
We introduce the problem of assigning resources to improve their utilization. The motivation comes from settings where agents have uncertainty about their own values for using a resource, and where it is in the interest of a group that…
This paper studies the efficiency of battery storage operations in electricity markets by comparing the social welfare gain achieved by a central planner to that of a decentralized profit-maximizing operator. The problem is formulated in a…