Related papers: Welfare and Beyond in Multi-Agent Contracts
We consider the problem of helping agents improve by setting short-term goals. Given a set of target skill levels, we assume each agent will try to improve from their initial skill level to the closest target level within reach or do…
In fair division problems, the notion of price of fairness measures the loss in welfare due to a fairness constraint. Prior work on the price of fairness has focused primarily on envy-freeness up to one good (EF1) as the fairness…
We study the problem of maximizing Nash social welfare, which is the geometric mean of agents' utilities, in two well-known models. The first model involves one-sided preferences, where a set of indivisible items is allocated among a group…
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…
In this work, we propose an axiomatic approach for measuring the performance/welfare of a system consisting of concurrent agents in a resource-driven system. Our approach provides a unifying view on popular system optimality principles,…
We study the optimal joint intervention of a planner who can influence both the standalone marginal utilities of agents in a network and the weights of the links connecting them. The welfare-maximizing intervention displays two key…
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…
Fair allocation of indivisible goods studies allocating $m$ goods among $n$ agents in a fair manner. While fairness is a fundamental requirement in many real-world applications, it often conflicts with (economic) efficiency. This raises a…
Given an initial resource allocation, where some agents may envy others or where a different distribution of resources might lead to higher social welfare, our goal is to improve the allocation without reassigning resources. We consider a…
Computational and economic results suggest that social welfare maximization and combinatorial auction design are much easier when bidders' valuations satisfy the "gross substitutes" condition. The goal of this paper is to evaluate…
We study fair allocation of constrained resources, where a market designer optimizes overall welfare while maintaining group fairness. In many large-scale settings, utilities are not known in advance, but are instead observed after…
Social dilemmas present a significant challenge in multi-agent cooperation because individuals are incentivised to behave in ways that undermine socially optimal outcomes. Consequently, self-interested agents often avoid collective…
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 analyze the run-time complexity of computing allocations that are both fair and maximize the utilitarian social welfare, defined as the sum of agents' utilities. We focus on two tractable fairness concepts: envy-freeness up to one item…
We initiate the study of matching roommates and rooms wherein the preferences of agents over other agents and rooms are complementary and represented by Leontief utilities. In this setting, 2n agents must be paired up and assigned to n…
We consider the design of mechanisms that allocate limited resources among self-interested agents using neural networks. Unlike the recent works that leverage machine learning for revenue maximization in auctions, we consider welfare…
We study contract design for welfare maximization in the well known "common agency" model of [Bernheim and Whinston, 1986]. This model combines the challenges of coordinating multiple principals with the fundamental challenge of contract…
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…
Motivated by real-world applications, we study the fair allocation of graphical resources, where the resources are the vertices in a graph. Upon receiving a set of resources, an agent's utility equals the weight of a maximum matching in the…
Participatory budgeting (PB) is a voting paradigm for distributing a divisible resource, usually called a budget, among a set of projects by aggregating the preferences of individuals over these projects. It is implemented quite extensively…