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The hidden-action model provides an optimal sharing rule for situations in which a principal assigns a task to an agent who makes an effort to carry out the task assigned to him. However, the principal can only observe the task outcome but…

General Economics · Economics 2022-10-18 Stephan Leitner , Friederike Wall

How do we formalize the challenge of credit assignment in reinforcement learning? Common intuition would draw attention to reward sparsity as a key contributor to difficult credit assignment and traditional heuristics would look to temporal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-03-11 Dilip Arumugam , Peter Henderson , Pierre-Luc Bacon

In this paper, we study axiomatic foundations of Bayesian persuasion, where a principal (i.e., sender) delegates the task of choice making after informing a biased agent (i.e., receiver) about the payoff relevant uncertain state (see, e.g.,…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-12-30 Youichiro Higashi , Kemal Ozbek , Norio Takeoka

Strategic information design is a framework where a sender designs information strategically to steer its receiver's decision towards a desired choice. Traditionally, such frameworks have always assumed that the sender and the receiver…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2021-07-23 Doris E. M. Brown , Venkata Sriram Siddhardh Nadendla

Contemporary scientific research is a distributed, collaborative endeavor, carried out by teams of researchers, regulatory institutions, funding agencies, commercial partners, and scientific bodies, all interacting with each other and…

Methodology · Statistics 2024-02-09 Stephen Bates , Michael I. Jordan , Michael Sklar , Jake A. Soloff

Recent developments in sequential experimental design look to construct a policy that can efficiently navigate the design space, in a way that maximises the expected information gain. Whilst there is work on achieving tractable policies for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-20 Yasir Zubayr Barlas , Kizito Salako

The travel costs of the players (travelers) in anonymous congestion games depend on their choices of routes and also on the states of the transportation network such as incidents, weather, and road work. In this extended abstract, we…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-07-20 Tao Zhang

Strategic learning studies how decision rules interact with agents who may strategically change their inputs/features to achieve better outcomes. In standard settings, models assume that the decision-maker's sole scope is to learn a…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Valia Efthymiou , Ekaterina Fedorova , Chara Podimata

How do incentive levels affect strategic behaviour? We address this with an experiment that separately identifies own- and opponent-incentive effects in two dominance-solvable games that differ in strategic complexity. Higher own incentives…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-03-30 Teresa Esteban-Casanelles , Duarte Gonçalves

We study reward design strategies for incentivizing a reinforcement learning agent to adopt a policy from a set of admissible policies. The goal of the reward designer is to modify the underlying reward function cost-efficiently while…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-01-07 Kiarash Banihashem , Adish Singla , Jiarui Gan , Goran Radanovic

We introduce an agent-based model of delegation relationships between a principal and an agent, which is based on the standard-hidden action model introduced by Holmstr\"om and, by doing so, provide a model which can be used to further…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2020-09-29 Patrick Reinwald , Stephan Leitner , Friederike Wall

As algorithmic tools increasingly aid experts in making consequential decisions, the need to understand the precise factors that mediate their influence has grown commensurately. In this paper, we present a crowdsourcing vignette study…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2022-05-20 Riccardo Fogliato , Sina Fazelpour , Shantanu Gupta , Zachary Lipton , David Danks

Data is the central commodity of the digital economy. Unlike physical goods, it is non-rival, replicable at near-zero cost, and traded under heterogeneous licensing rules. These properties defy standard supply--demand theory and call for…

Physics and Society · Physics 2025-10-13 Pasquale Casaburi , Giovanni Piccioli , Pierpaolo Vivo

We study a novel approach to information design in the standard traffic model of network congestion games. It captures the natural condition that the demand is unknown to the users of the network. A principal (e.g., a mobility service)…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-10-13 Svenja M. Griesbach , Martin Hoefer , Max Klimm , Tim Koglin

We consider the impact of incomplete information on incentives for node cooperation in parallel relay networks with one source node, one destination node, and multiple relay nodes. All nodes are selfish and strategic, interested in…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2011-01-24 Hongda Xiao , Edmund M. Yeh

We consider a two-road dynamic routing game where the state of one of the roads (the "risky road") is stochastic and may change over time. This generates room for experimentation. A central planner may wish to induce some of the (finite…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2020-01-13 Emily Meigs , Francesca Parise , Asuman Ozdaglar , Daron Acemoglu

Machine learning algorithms are increasingly used for consequential decision making regarding individuals based on their relevant features. Features that are relevant for accurate decisions may however lead to either explicit or implicit…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-06-09 Sajad Khodadadian , Mohamed Nafea , AmirEmad Ghassami , Negar Kiyavash

We develop a general problem setting for training and testing the ability of agents to gather information efficiently. Specifically, we present a collection of tasks in which success requires searching through a partially-observed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-12-09 Philip Bachman , Alessandro Sordoni , Adam Trischler

We study allocation problems without monetary transfers where agents have correlated types, i.e., hold private information about one another. Such peer information is relevant in various settings, including science funding, allocation of…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-03-21 Axel Niemeyer , Justus Preusser

Motivating careerists is challenging for political organizations. Without explicit contracts, careerists often pander to public opinions or their superiors' preferences. Worse, when tasked with implementing these distorted decisions, they…

General Economics · Economics 2026-05-15 Liqun Liu