Related papers: Welfare and Beyond in Multi-Agent Contracts
In many social computing applications such as online Q&A forums, the best contribution for each task receives some high reward, while all remaining contributions receive an identical, lower reward irrespective of their actual qualities.…
We consider the following communication problem: Alice and Bob each have some valuation functions $v_1(\cdot)$ and $v_2(\cdot)$ over subsets of $m$ items, and their goal is to partition the items into $S, \bar{S}$ in a way that maximizes…
A principal contracts with an agent who sequentially searches over projects to generate a prize. The principal initially knows only one of the agent's available projects and evaluates a contract by its worst-case performance. We…
In settings where players have a limited access to liquidity, represented in the form of budget constraints, efficiency maximization has proven to be a challenging goal. In particular, the social welfare cannot be approximated by a better…
We study the efficiency guarantees in the simple auction environment where the auctioneer has one unit of divisible good to be distributed among a number of budget constrained agents. With budget constraints, the social welfare cannot be…
Many multi-agent socio-technical systems rely on aggregating heterogeneous agents' costs into a social cost function (SCF) to coordinate resource allocation in domains like energy grids, water allocation, or traffic management. The choice…
We study Bayesian mechanism design problems in settings where agents have budgets. Specifically, an agent's utility for an outcome is given by his value for the outcome minus any payment he makes to the mechanism, as long as the payment is…
We consider the problem of repeatedly choosing policies to maximize social welfare. Welfare is a weighted sum of private utility and public revenue. Earlier outcomes inform later policies. Utility is not observed, but indirectly inferred.…
We study the combinatorial contract design problem, introduced and studied by Dutting et. al. (2021, 2022), in both the single and multi-agent settings. Prior work has examined the problem when the principal's utility function is submodular…
Decades of research in machine learning have given us powerful tools for making accurate predictions. But when used in social settings and on human inputs, better accuracy does not immediately translate to better social outcomes. To…
Combinatorial Auctions are a central problem in Algorithmic Mechanism Design: pricing and allocating goods to buyers with complex preferences in order to maximize some desired objective (e.g., social welfare, revenue, or profit). The…
We develop polynomial-time algorithms for the fair and efficient allocation of indivisible goods among $n$ agents that have subadditive valuations over the goods. We first consider the Nash social welfare as our objective and design a…
Welfare economics relies on access to agents' utility functions: we revisit classical questions in welfare economics, assuming access to data on agents' past choices instead of their utilities. Our main result considers the existence of…
Agents often have individual goals which depend on a group's actions. If agents trust a forecast of collective action and adapt strategically, such prediction can influence outcomes non-trivially, resulting in a form of performative…
This paper is merged with arXiv:2107.08965v2. We refer the reader to the full and updated version. We study the problem of allocating a set of indivisible goods among agents with 2-value additive valuations. Our goal is to find an…
We analyze a two-period principal-agent model in which the principal faces a budget constraint, and the agent's private costs of performing tasks across the two periods may be correlated. We examine the optimal design of the reward scheme…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly entrusted with high-stakes decisions that affect human welfare. However, the principles and values that guide these models when distributing scarce societal resources remain largely unexamined.…
We consider the social welfare that can be facilitated by a constant function market maker (CFMM). When there is sufficient liquidity available to the CFMM, it can approximate the optimal social welfare when all users transactions are…
Budget feasible mechanism design studies procurement combinatorial auctions where the sellers have private costs to produce items, and the buyer(auctioneer) aims to maximize a social valuation function on subsets of items, under the budget…
We consider a social planner faced with a stream of myopic selfish agents. The goal of the social planner is to maximize the social welfare, however, it is limited to using only information asymmetry (regarding previous outcomes) and cannot…