Related papers: A characterization of strategy-proof probabilistic…
Markov chains are the de facto finite-state model for stochastic dynamical systems, and Markov decision processes (MDPs) extend Markov chains by incorporating non-deterministic behaviors. Given an MDP and rewards on states, a classical…
When aggregating preferences of agents via voting, two desirable goals are to incentivize agents to participate in the voting process and then identify outcomes that are Pareto efficient. We consider participation as formalized by Brandl,…
We study the trade-offs between strategyproofness and other desiderata, such as efficiency or fairness, that often arise in the design of random ordinal mechanisms. We use approximate strategyproofness to define manipulability, a measure to…
We study the incentivized information acquisition problem, where a principal hires an agent to gather information on her behalf. Such a problem is modeled as a Stackelberg game between the principal and the agent, where the principal…
In mechanism design it is typical to impose incentive compatibility and then derive an optimal mechanism subject to this constraint. By replacing the incentive compatibility requirement with the goal of minimizing expected ex post regret,…
We study a decision-maker's problem of finding optimal monetary incentive schemes for retention when faced with agents whose participation decisions (stochastically) depend on the incentive they receive. Our focus is on policies constrained…
We study matching settings in which a set of agents have private utilities over a set of items. Each agent reports a partition of the items into approval sets of different threshold utility levels. Given this limited information on input,…
Yahtzee is a classic dice game with a stochastic, combinatorial structure and delayed rewards, making it an interesting mid-scale RL benchmark. While an optimal policy for solitaire Yahtzee can be computed using dynamic programming methods,…
In recommender system or crowdsourcing applications of online learning, a human's preferences or abilities are often a function of the algorithm's recent actions. Motivated by this, a significant line of work has formalized settings where…
Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are the most common model for decision making under uncertainty in the Machine Learning community. An MDP captures non-determinism, probabilistic uncertainty, and an explicit model of action. A Reinforcement…
A principal has $m$ identical objects to allocate among a group of $n$ agents. Objects are desirable and the principal's value of assigning an object to an agent is the agent's private information. The principal can verify up to $k$ agents,…
A strictly strategy-proof mechanism is one that asks agents to use strictly dominant strategies. In the canonical one-dimensional mechanism design setting with private values, we show that strict strategy-proofness is equivalent to strict…
We propose a simple generalization of standard and empirically successful decision tree learning algorithms such as ID3, C4.5, and CART. These algorithms, which have been central to machine learning for decades, are greedy in nature: they…
Multi-agent Markov Decision Processes (MMDPs) arise in a variety of applications including target tracking, control of multi-robot swarms, and multiplayer games. A key challenge in MMDPs occurs when the state and action spaces grow…
Fixed-parameter tractability analysis and scheduling are two core domains of combinatorial optimization which led to deep understanding of many important algorithmic questions. However, even though fixed-parameter algorithms are appealing…
We investigate the possibility of an incentive-compatible (IC, a.k.a. strategy-proof) mechanism for the classification of agents in a network according to their reviews of each other. In the $ \alpha $-classification problem we are…
We study fairness in social choice settings under single-peaked preferences. Construction and characterization of social choice rules in the single-peaked domain has been extensively studied in prior works. In fact, in the single-peaked…
In this paper, we consider a general distributed system with multiple agents who select and then implement actions in the system. The system has an operator with a centralized objective. The agents, on the other hand, are selfinterested and…
As a schematic model of the complexity economic agents are confronted with, we introduce the ``SK-game'', a discrete time binary choice model inspired from mean-field spin-glasses. We show that even in a completely static environment,…
We consider the facility location problem in a metric space, focusing on the case of three agents. We show that selecting the reported location of each agent with probability proportional to the distance between the other two agents results…