Related papers: Combinatorial Contract Design: Recent Progress and…
The design of distributed algorithms is central to the study of multiagent systems control. In this paper, we consider a class of combinatorial cost-minimization problems and propose a framework for designing distributed algorithms with a…
A principal uses payments conditioned on stochastic outcomes of a team project to elicit costly effort from the team members. We develop a multi-agent generalization of a classic first-order approach to contract optimization by leveraging…
Crowdsourcing has emerged as a paradigm for leveraging human intelligence and activity to solve a wide range of tasks. However, strategic workers will find enticement in their self-interest to free-ride and attack in a crowdsourcing contest…
The design of revenue-maximizing combinatorial auctions, i.e. multi-item auctions over bundles of goods, is one of the most fundamental problems in computational economics, unsolved even for two bidders and two items for sale. In the…
This paper explores the emergence of norms in agents' societies when agents play multiple -even incompatible- roles in their social contexts simultaneously, and have limited interaction ranges. Specifically, this article proposes two…
Collusion in market pricing is a concept associated with human actions to raise market prices through artificially limited supply. Recently, the idea of algorithmic collusion was put forward, where the human action in the pricing process is…
Federated learning (FL) serves as a data privacy-preserved machine learning paradigm, and realizes the collaborative model trained by distributed clients. To accomplish an FL task, the task publisher needs to pay financial incentives to the…
Contract-based design is a promising methodology for taming the complexity of developing sophisticated systems. A formal contract distinguishes between assumptions, which are constraints that the designer of a component puts on the…
We analyze how firms should design wage contracts when workers collaborate in teams and effort costs depend on colleagues through a peer network. Performance-based compensation generates incentives that cascade through the organization,…
We initiate the study of computing (near-)optimal contracts in succinctly representable principal-agent settings. Here optimality means maximizing the principal's expected payoff over all incentive-compatible contracts---known in economics…
This paper proposes a method to design an optimal dynamic contract between a principal and an agent, who has the authority to control both the principal's revenue and an engineered system. The key characteristic of our problem setting is…
Team formation is a core problem in AI. Remarkably, little prior work has addressed the problem of mechanism design for team formation, accounting for the need to elicit agents' preferences over potential teammates. Coalition formation in…
Economic theory distinguishes between principal-agent settings in which the agent has a private type and settings in which the agent takes a hidden action. Many practical problems, however, involve aspects of both. For example, brand X may…
The rise of algorithmic pricing in online retail platforms has attracted significant interest in how autonomous software agents interact under competition. This article explores the potential emergence of algorithmic collusion -…
We present a continuous-time contract whereby a top-level player can incentivize a hierarchy of players below him to act in his best interest despite only observing the output of his direct subordinate. This paper extends Sannikov's…
Design-by-contract is an important technique for model-based design in which a composite system is specified by a collection of contracts that specify the behavioural assumptions and guarantees of each component. In this paper, we describe…
Although both data availability and the demand for accurate forecasts are increasing, collaboration between stakeholders is often constrained by data ownership and competitive interests. In contrast to recent proposals within cooperative…
Financial options are contracts that specify the right to buy or sell an underlying asset at a strike price by an expiration date. Standard exchanges offer options of predetermined strike values and trade options of different strikes…
In applications such as participatory sensing and crowd sensing, self-interested agents exert costly effort towards achieving an objective for the system operator. We study such a setup where a principal incentivizes multiple agents of…
A large fraction of total healthcare expenditure occurs due to end-of-life (EOL) care, which means it is important to study the problem of more carefully incentivizing necessary versus unnecessary EOL care because this has the potential to…