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Related papers: Delegation with Costly Inspection

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We analyze the delegation of pricing by participants, representing firms, to a collusive, self-learning algorithm in a repeated Bertrand experiment. In the baseline treatment, participants set prices themselves. In the other treatments,…

General Economics · Economics 2025-11-03 Hans-Theo Normann , Nina Rulié , Olaf Stypa , Tobias Werner

Peer reviews, evaluations, and selections are a fundamental aspect of modern science. Funding bodies the world over employ experts to review and select the best proposals from those submitted for funding. The problem of peer selection,…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2019-05-01 Haris Aziz , Omer Lev , Nicholas Mattei , Jeffrey S. Rosenschein , Toby Walsh

In this paper, we study a new stochastic submodular maximization problem with state-dependent costs and rejections. The input of our problem is a budget constraint $B$, and a set of items whose states (i.e., the marginal contribution and…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2021-11-12 Shaojie Tang

In liquid democracy, each voter either votes herself or delegates her vote to some other voter. This gives rise to what is called a delegation graph. To decide the voters who eventually votes along with the subset of voters whose votes they…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2020-12-01 Palash Dey , Arnab Maiti , Amatya Sharma

Constrained submodular set function maximization problems often appear in multi-agent decision-making problems with a discrete feasible set. A prominent example is the problem of multi-agent mobile sensor placement over a discrete domain.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-08-02 Navid Rezazadeh , Solmaz S. Kia

We consider Incentive Decision Processes, where a principal seeks to reduce its costs due to another agent's behavior, by offering incentives to the agent for alternate behavior. We focus on the case where a principal interacts with a…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2012-10-19 Sashank J. Reddi , Emma Brunskill

Preference elicitation is a central problem in AI, and has received significant attention in single-agent settings. It is also a key problem in multiagent systems, but has received little attention here so far. In this setting, the agents…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2007-05-23 Vincent Conitzer , Tuomas Sandholm

Decentralized partially observable Markov decision processes (Dec-POMDPs) are rich models for cooperative decision-making under uncertainty, but are often intractable to solve optimally (NEXP-complete). The transition and observation…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2012-10-19 Jilles S. Dibangoye , Christopher Amato , Arnoud Doniec

We consider a novel queuing problem where the decision-maker must choose to accept or reject randomly arriving tasks into a no buffer queue which are processed by $N$ identical servers. Each task has a price, which is a positive real…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-16 Marc Rigter , Danial Dervovic , Parisa Hassanzadeh , Jason Long , Parisa Zehtabi , Daniele Magazzeni

Weitzman (1979) introduced the Pandora Box problem as a model for sequential search with inspection costs, and gave an elegant index-based policy that attains provably optimal expected payoff. In various scenarios, the searching agent may…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2022-12-06 Hu Fu , Jiawei Li , Daogao Liu

We study a distributed facility location problem in which a set of agents, each with a private position on the real line, is partitioned into a collection of fixed, disjoint groups. The goal is to open $k$ facilities at locations chosen…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-01-22 Argyrios Deligkas , Panagiotis Kanellopoulos , Alexandros A. Voudouris

Privacy has been a major motivation for distributed problem optimization. However, even though several methods have been proposed to evaluate it, none of them is widely used. The Distributed Constraint Optimization Problem (DCOP) is a…

When Agent A delegates to Agent B, which invokes Tool C on behalf of User X, no existing framework can answer: whose authorization chain led to this action, and where did it violate policy? This paper introduces SentinelAgent, a formal…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-06 KrishnaSaiReddy Patil

In this study we analyze linear mixed-integer programming problems, in which the distribution of the cost vector is only observable through a finite training data set. In contrast to the related studies, we assume that the number of random…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-05-20 Sergey S. Ketkov , Andrei S. Shilov

Coordination of distributed agents is required for problems arising in many areas, including multi-robot systems, networking and e-commerce. As a formal framework for such problems, we use the decentralized partially observable Markov…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2014-01-16 Daniel S. Bernstein , Christopher Amato , Eric A. Hansen , Shlomo Zilberstein

We study a constrained distributed heterogeneous two-facility location problem, where a set of agents with private locations on the real line are divided into disjoint groups. The constraint means that the facilities can only be built in a…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Xinru Xu , Wenjing Liu , Qizhi Fang

In the combinatorial-action contract model (D\"utting et al., FOCS'21) a principal delegates the execution of a complex project to an agent, who can choose any subset from a given set of actions. Each set of actions incurs a cost to the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-11-27 Paul Dütting , Michal Feldman , Yoav Gal-Tzur , Aviad Rubinstein

We introduce a new model of combinatorial contracts in which a principal delegates the execution of a costly task to an agent. To complete the task, the agent can take any subset of a given set of unobservable actions, each of which has an…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Paul Duetting , Tomer Ezra , Michal Feldman , Thomas Kesselheim

In this paper we challenge the widely accepted premise that, in order to carry out a distributed computation, say on the cloud, users have to inform, along with all the inputs that the algorithm in use requires, the number of processors to…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2019-09-23 Fabiano de S. Oliveira , Valmir C. Barbosa

We consider a distributed computing system in which a master node coordinates $N$ workers to evaluate a function over $n$ input files, where this function accepts general decomposition. In particular, we focus on the general case where the…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Javad Maheri , K. K. Krishnan Namboodiri , Petros Elia