Related papers: Delegation with Costly Inspection
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 $n$…
Selection problems with costly information, dating back to Weitzman's Pandora's Box problem, have received much attention recently. We study the general model of Costly Information Combinatorial Selection (CICS) that was recently introduced…
We study the problem of fair $k$-committee selection under an egalitarian objective. Given $n$ agents partitioned into $m$ groups (\eg, demographic quotas), the goal is to aggregate their preferences to form a committee of size $k$ that…
We develop and apply epistemic tests to various decentralized governance methods as well as to study the impact of participation. These tests probe the ability to reach a correct outcome when there is one. We find that partial abstention is…
We examine vote delegation when preferences of agents are private information. One group of agents (delegators) does not want to participate in voting and abstains under conventional voting or can delegate its votes to the other group…
This paper derives polynomial-time approximation schemes for several NP-hard stochastic optimization problems from the algorithmic mechanism design and operations research literatures. The problems we consider involve a principal or seller…
Consider a network design application where we wish to lay down a minimum-cost spanning tree in a given graph; however, we only have stochastic information about the edge costs. To learn the precise cost of any edge, we have to conduct a…
Monitoring LLM safety at scale requires balancing cost and accuracy: a cheap latent-space probe can screen every input, but hard cases should be escalated to a more expensive expert. Existing cascades delegate based on probe uncertainty,…
The Pandora's Box problem models the search for the best alternative when evaluation is costly. In the simplest variant, a decision maker is presented with $n$ boxes, each associated with a cost of inspection and a hidden random reward. The…
We study a model of delegation in which a principal takes a multidimensional action and an agent has private information about a multidimensional state of the world. The principal can design any direct mechanism, including stochastic ones.…
A version of the secretary problem is considered. The ranks of items, whose values are independent, identically distributed random variables $X_1,X_2,...,X_n$ from a uniform distribution on $[0; 1]$, are observed sequentially by the grader.…
We present an instance of the optimal sensor scheduling problem with the additional relaxation that our observer makes active choices whether or not to observe and how to observe. We mask the nodes in a directed acyclic graph of the model…
A proposer requires the approval of a veto player to change a status quo. Preferences are single peaked. Proposer is uncertain about Vetoer's ideal point. We study Proposer's optimal mechanism without transfers. Vetoer is given a menu, or a…
A decisionmaker faces $n$ alternatives, each of which represents a potential reward. After investing costly resources into investigating the alternatives, the decisionmaker may select one, or more generally a feasible subset, and obtain the…
Suppose a set of requests arrives online: each request gives some value $v_i$ if accepted, but requires using some amount of each of $d$ resources. Our cost is a convex function of the vector of total utilization of these $d$ resources.…
The Pandora's box problem (Weitzman 1979) is a core model in economic theory that captures an agent's (Pandora's) search for the best alternative (box). We study an important generalization of the problem where the agent can either fully…
We design a mechanism for Fair and Efficient Distribution of Resources (FEDoR) in the presence of strategic agents. We consider a multiple-instances, Bayesian setting, where in each round the preference of an agent over the set of resources…
We study the problem of evaluating a discrete function by adaptively querying the values of its variables until the values read uniquely determine the value of the function. Reading the value of a variable is done at the expense of some…
When organizations delegate text generation tasks to AI providers via pay-for-performance contracts, expected payments rise when evaluation is noisy. As evaluation methods become more elaborate, the economic benefits of decreased noise are…
A principal contracts with an agent through an informed delegate. Although the principal cannot directly mediate the interaction, she can restrict the menus of contracts the delegate may offer. We characterize the outcomes implementable…