Related papers: Welfare and Beyond in Multi-Agent Contracts
Ensuring that AI agents behave safely and beneficially when interacting with other parties has emerged as one of the central challenges of modern AI safety. While mechanism design, as the theory of designing rules to align individual and…
In this paper, we consider a general distributed system with multiple agents who select and then implement actions in the system. The system has an operator with a centralized objective. The agents, on the other hand, are selfinterested and…
We study the combinatorial contracting problem of D\"utting et al. [FOCS '21], in which a principal seeks to incentivize an agent to take a set of costly actions. In their model, there is a binary outcome (the agent can succeed or fail),…
We study the allocation of indivisible items that form an undirected graph and investigate the worst-case welfare loss when requiring that each agent must receive a connected subgraph. Our focus is on both egalitarian and utilitarian…
In combinatorial auctions, a designer must decide how to allocate a set of indivisible items amongst a set of bidders. Each bidder has a valuation function which gives the utility they obtain from any subset of the items. Our focus is…
Civic Crowdfunding (CC) uses the ``power of the crowd'' to garner contributions towards public projects. As these projects are non-excludable, agents may prefer to ``free-ride,'' resulting in the project not being funded. For single project…
We study a multi-agent contract design problem with moral hazard. In our model, each agent exerts costly effort towards an individual task at which it may either succeed or fail, and the principal, who wishes to encourage effort, has an…
We study the problem of allocating indivisible items to budget-constrained agents, aiming to provide fairness and efficiency guarantees. Specifically, our goal is to ensure that the resulting allocation is envy-free up to any item (EFx)…
We study fair division of indivisible goods in a single-parameter environment. In particular, we develop truthful social welfare maximizing mechanisms for fairly allocating indivisible goods. Our fairness guarantees are in terms of solution…
We study the problem of maximizing Nash welfare (MNW) while allocating indivisible goods to asymmetric agents. The Nash welfare of an allocation is the weighted geometric mean of agents' utilities, and the allocation with maximum Nash…
We study multi-agent contract design with combinatorial actions, under budget constraints, and for a broad class of objective functions, including profit (principal's utility), reward, and welfare. Our first result is a strong…
In various multi-agent negotiation settings, a negotiator's utility depends, either partially or fully, on the sum of negotiators' utilities (i.e., social welfare). While the need for effective negotiating-agent designs that take into…
We initiate the study of multidimensional Bayesian utility maximization, focusing on the unit-demand setting where values are i.i.d. across both items and buyers. The seminal result of Hartline and Roughgarden '08 studies simple,…
We investigate the mechanism design problem faced by a principal who hires \emph{multiple} agents to gather and report costly information. Then, the principal exploits the information to make an informed decision. We model this problem as a…
Motivated by the success of the serial dictatorship mechanism in social choice settings, we explore its usefulness in tackling various combinatorial optimization problems. We do so by considering an abstract model, in which a set of agents…
This paper considers the hidden-action model of the principal-agent problem, in which a principal incentivizes an agent to work on a project using a contract. We investigate whether contracts with bounded payments are learnable and…
We investigate the problem of maximizing social welfare while ensuring fairness in a multi-agent multi-armed bandit (MA-MAB) setting. In this problem, a centralized decision-maker takes actions over time, generating random rewards for…
A set of divisible resources becomes available over a sequence of rounds and needs to be allocated immediately and irrevocably. Our goal is to distribute these resources to maximize fairness and efficiency. Achieving any non-trivial…
Cooperation is fundamental for society's viability, as it enables the emergence of structure within heterogeneous groups that seek collective well-being. However, individuals are inclined to defect in order to benefit from the group's…
We introduce and study a multi-class online resource allocation problem with group fairness guarantees. The problem involves allocating a fixed amount of resources to a sequence of agents, each belonging to a specific group. The primary…