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Ensuring safety in autonomous multi-agent systems during time-critical tasks such as rendezvous is a fundamental challenge, particularly under communication delays and uncertainty in system parameters. In this paper, we develop a…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-11-27 Vivek Pandey , Nader Motee

A canonical setting for non-monetary online resource allocation is one where agents compete over multiple rounds for a single item per round, with i.i.d. valuations and additive utilities across rounds. With $n$ symmetric agents, a natural…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-12-01 David X. Lin , Giannis Fikioris , Siddhartha Banerjee , Éva Tardos

Distributionally robust optimization (DRO) studies decision problems under uncertainty where the probability distribution governing the uncertain problem parameters is itself uncertain. A key component of any DRO model is its ambiguity set,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-05-28 Daniel Kuhn , Soroosh Shafiee , Wolfram Wiesemann

Contract scheduling is a general technique that allows to design a system with interruptible capabilities, given an algorithm that is not necessarily interruptible. Previous work on this topic has largely assumed that the interruption is a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-11-26 Spyros Angelopoulos , Shahin Kamali

We study the problem of fair online resource allocation via non-monetary mechanisms, where multiple agents repeatedly share a resource without monetary transfers. Previous work has shown that every agent can guarantee $1/2$ of their ideal…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-05-27 David X. Lin , Daniel Hall , Giannis Fikioris , Siddhartha Banerjee , Éva Tardos

Fairness is desirable yet challenging to achieve within multi-agent systems, especially when agents differ in latent traits that affect their abilities. This hidden heterogeneity often leads to unequal distributions of wealth, even when…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Jakub Tłuczek , Victor Villin , Christos Dimitrakakis

Combinatorial contracts are emerging as a key paradigm in algorithmic contract design, paralleling the role of combinatorial auctions in algorithmic mechanism design. In this paper we study natural combinatorial contract settings involving…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-05-15 Paul Duetting , Tomer Ezra , Michal Feldman , Thomas Kesselheim

Adaptive model predictive control (MPC) robustly ensures safety while reducing uncertainty during operation. In this paper, a distributed version is proposed to deal with network systems featuring multiple agents and limited communication.…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-04-17 Anilkumar Parsi , Ahmed Aboudonia , Andrea Iannelli , John Lygeros , Roy S. Smith

In this work, we study a single-machine scheduling problem that aims at minimizing the total cost of a schedule subject to start-time dependent costs. This framework naturally captures scenarios where costs fluctuate throughout the day,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-17 Sofía Rodríguez-Ballesteros , Javier Alcaraz , Laura Anton-Sanchez , Marc Goerigk , Dorothee Henke

We study the robust regulation of contracts in moral hazard problems. A firm offers a contract to incentivise a worker protected by limited liability. A regulator restricts the set of permissible contracts to (i) improve efficiency and (ii)…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-09-17 Théo Durandard , Alexis Ghersengorin

We study the mechanism design problem of selling a public good to a group of agents by a principal in the correlated private value environment. We assume the principal only knows the expectations of the agents' values, but does not know the…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2022-01-06 Wanchang Zhang

Crowdsourcing markets have emerged as a popular platform for matching available workers with tasks to complete. The payment for a particular task is typically set by the task's requester, and may be adjusted based on the quality of the…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2015-09-03 Chien-Ju Ho , Aleksandrs Slivkins , Jennifer Wortman Vaughan

We consider a dynamic moral hazard problem between a principal and an agent, where the sole instrument the principal has to incentivize the agent is the disclosure of information. The principal aims at maximizing the (discounted) number of…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2021-03-09 Wei Zhao , Claudio Mezzetti , Ludovic Renou , Tristan Tomala

In this paper, we consider an adaptive approach to address optimization problems with uncertain cost parameters. Here, the decision maker selects an initial decision, observes the realization of the uncertain cost parameters, and then is…

Computational Complexity · Computer Science 2013-12-17 Ebrahim Nasrabadi , James B. Orlin

In the combinatorial action model of contract design, a principal delegates a complex project to an agent, incentivizing a subset of actions from a ground set of $n$ actions, via a linear contract. Computing the optimal contract is a…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Elizabeth Baldwin , Paul Duetting , Michal Feldman , Maya Schlesinger

We present a distributionally robust optimization (DRO) approach for the transmission expansion planning problem, considering both long- and short-term uncertainties on the system demand and non-dispatchable renewable generation. On the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-03-17 Alexandre Velloso , David Pozo , Alexandre Street

A contract is an economic tool used by a principal to incentivize one or more agents to exert effort on her behalf, by defining payments based on observable performance measures. A key challenge addressed by contracts -- known in economics…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Paul Duetting , Michal Feldman , Inbal Talgam-Cohen

Many real-life contractual relations differ completely from the clean, static model at the heart of principal-agent theory. Typically, they involve repeated strategic interactions of the principal and agent, taking place under uncertainty…

Distributed optimization finds applications in large-scale machine learning, data processing and classification over multi-agent networks. In real-world scenarios, the communication network of agents may encounter latency that may affect…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-10-06 Mohammadreza Doostmohammadian , Narahari Kasagatta Ramesh , Alireza Aghasi

We propose to study electricity capacity remuneration mechanism design through a Principal-Agent approach. The Principal represents the aggregation of electricity consumers (or a representative entity), subject to the physical risk of…

General Economics · Economics 2020-09-02 Clémence Alasseur , Heythem Farhat , Marcelo Saguan