English
Related papers

Related papers: Welfare and Beyond in Multi-Agent Contracts

200 papers

We study the optimal contract problem in the \emph{combinatorial actions} framework of D\"utting et al.~[FOCS'21], where a principal delegates a project to an agent who chooses a subset of hidden, costly actions, and the resulting reward is…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Michal Feldman , Liat Yashin

In principal-agent models, a principal offers a contract to an agent to perform a certain task. The agent exerts a level of effort that maximizes her utility. The principal is oblivious to the agent's chosen level of effort, and conditions…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-07-14 Alon Cohen , Moran Koren , Argyrios Deligkas

We initiate the study of computing (near-)optimal contracts in succinctly representable principal-agent settings. Here optimality means maximizing the principal's expected payoff over all incentive-compatible contracts---known in economics…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2020-02-28 Paul Duetting , Tim Roughgarden , Inbal Talgam-Cohen

We study linear contracts for combinatorial problems in multi-agent settings. In this problem, a principal designs a linear contract with several agents, each of whom can decide to take a costly action or not. The principal observes only…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-12-19 Kanstantsin Pashkovich , Jacob Skitsko

Schelling's model is an influential model that reveals how individual perceptions and incentives can lead to residential segregation. Inspired by a recent stream of work, we study welfare guarantees and complexity in this model with respect…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-03-21 Martin Bullinger , Warut Suksompong , Alexandros A. Voudouris

We consider the problem of allocating divisible items among multiple agents, and consider the setting where any agent is allowed to introduce diversity constraints on the items they are allocated. We motivate this via settings where the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2021-10-01 Zeyu Shen , Lodewijk Gelauff , Ashish Goel , Aleksandra Korolova , Kamesh Munagala

We study a participatory budgeting problem of aggregating the preferences of agents and dividing a budget over the projects. A budget division solution is a probability distribution over the projects. The main purpose of our study concerns…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2020-11-02 Zhongzheng Tang , Chenhao Wang , Mengqi Zhang

We study social welfare in one-sided matching markets where the goal is to efficiently allocate n items to n agents that each have a complete, private preference list and a unit demand over the items. Our focus is on allocation mechanisms…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2011-04-18 Anand Bhalgat , Deeparnab Chakrabarty , Sanjeev Khanna

Consider a principal who wants to search through a space of stochastic solutions for one maximizing their utility. If the principal cannot conduct this search on their own, they may instead delegate this problem to an agent with distinct…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-11-04 Curtis Bechtel , Shaddin Dughmi

Mechanism design for a social utility being the sum of agents' utilities (SoU) is a well-studied problem. There are, however, a number of problems of theoretical and practical interest where a designer may have a different objective than…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2015-09-29 Abhinav Sinha , Achilleas Anastasopoulos

We study the problem of fairly allocating a set of indivisible goods among agents with additive valuations. The extent of fairness of an allocation is measured by its Nash social welfare, which is the geometric mean of the valuations of the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2018-07-23 Siddharth Barman , Sanath Kumar Krishnamurthy , Rohit Vaish

The majority of multi-agent system (MAS) implementations aim to optimise agents' policies with respect to a single objective, despite the fact that many real-world problem domains are inherently multi-objective in nature. Multi-objective…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2020-11-17 Roxana Rădulescu , Patrick Mannion , Diederik M. Roijers , Ann Nowé

We study two stylized, multi-agent models aimed at investing a limited, indivisible resource in public transportation. In the first model, we face the decision of which potential stops to open along a (e.g., bus) path, given agents' travel…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Martin Bullinger , Edith Elkind , Kassian Köck

This paper studies algorithmic decision-making in the presence of strategic individual behaviors, where an ML model is used to make decisions about human agents and the latter can adapt their behavior strategically to improve their future…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-08-22 Tian Xie , Xueru Zhang

Consider a barter exchange problem over a finite set of agents, where each agent owns an item and is also associated with a (privately known) wish list of items belonging to the other agents. An outcome of the problem is a (re)allocation of…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-10-10 Yuval Emek , Matan-El Shpiro

In this paper, we study moral hazard problems in contract theory by adding an exogenous Planner to manage the actions of Agents hired by a Principal. We provide conditions ensuring that Pareto optima exist for the Agents using the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-06-06 Thibaut Mastrolia

We consider the principal-agent problem with heterogeneous agents. Previous works assume that the principal signs independent incentive contracts with every agent to make them invest more efforts on the tasks. However, in many…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2019-11-12 Shenke Xiao , Zihe Wang , Mengjing Chen , Pingzhong Tang , Xiwang Yang

Reinforcement learning has been shown to be an effective strategy for automatically training policies for challenging control problems. Focusing on non-cooperative multi-agent systems, we propose a novel reinforcement learning framework for…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-06-08 Kishor Jothimurugan , Suguman Bansal , Osbert Bastani , Rajeev Alur

We introduce a novel model of contracts with combinatorial actions that accounts for sequential and adaptive agent behavior. As in the standard model, a principal delegates the execution of a costly project to an agent. There are $n$…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-04-22 Tomer Ezra , Michal Feldman , Maya Schlesinger

We study the problem of efficiently and fairly allocating a set of indivisible goods among agents with identical and additive valuations for the goods. The objective is to maximize the Nash social welfare, which is the geometric mean of the…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2022-01-06 Asei Inoue , Yusuke Kobayashi