Related papers: Dynamic Reward Design
In practice, incentive providers (i.e., principals) often cannot observe the reward realizations of incentivized agents, which is in contrast to many principal-agent models that have been previously studied. This information asymmetry…
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…
Dynamic mechanism design studies how mechanism designers should allocate resources among agents in a time-varying environment. We consider the problem where the agents interact with the mechanism designer according to an unknown Markov…
Principal-Agent (PA) problems describe a broad class of economic relationships characterized by misaligned incentives and asymmetric information. The Principal's problem is to find optimal incentives given the available information, e.g., a…
A fundamental economic question is that of designing revenue-maximizing mechanisms in dynamic environments. This paper considers a simple yet compelling market model to tackle this question, where forward-looking buyers arrive at the market…
I study the optimal design of ratings to motivate agent investment in quality when transfers are unavailable. The principal designs a rating scheme that maps the agent's quality to a (possibly stochastic) score. The agent has private…
We study a sequential mechanism design problem in which a principal seeks to elicit truthful reports from multiple rational agents while starting with no prior knowledge of agents' beliefs. We introduce Distributionally Robust Adaptive…
We study a bilateral trade problem where a principal has private information that is revealed with delay, such as a seller who does not yet know her production cost. Postponing the contracting process incurs a costly delay, while early…
We consider the design of experiments to evaluate treatments that are administered by self-interested agents, each seeking to achieve the highest evaluation and win the experiment. For example, in an advertising experiment, a company wishes…
AI-assisted task delegation is increasingly common, yet human effort in such systems is costly and typically unobserved. Recent work by Bastani and Cachon (2025); Sambasivan et al. (2021) shows that accuracy-based payment schemes suffer…
Imitation is widely observed in populations of decision-making agents. Using our recent convergence results for asynchronous imitation dynamics on networks, we consider how such networks can be efficiently driven to a desired equilibrium…
We consider a general formulation of the Principal-Agent problem with a lump-sum payment on a finite horizon, providing a systematic method for solving such problems. Our approach is the following: we first find the contract that is optimal…
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…
Current LLM agents operate under an implicit but universal assumption: execution is a transaction -- the user submits a request, the agent works in isolation, and only upon completion does the dialogue resume. This forces users into a…
A fundamental assumption in classical mechanism design is that buyers are perfect optimizers. However, in practice, buyers may be limited by their computational capabilities or a lack of information, and may not be able to perfectly…
We consider a model where an agent has a repeated decision to make and wishes to maximize their total payoff. Payoffs are influenced by an action taken by the agent, but also an unknown state of the world that evolves over time. Before…
We study principal-agent problems in which a principal commits to an outcome-dependent payment scheme (a.k.a. contract) so as to induce an agent to take a costly, unobservable action. We relax the assumption that the principal perfectly…
We study the problem of a principal who wants to influence an agent's observable action, subject to an ex-post budget. The agent has a private type determining their cost function. This paper endogenizes the value of the resource driving…
We study the design of decision-making mechanism for resource allocations over a multi-agent system in a dynamic environment. Agents' privately observed preference over resources evolves over time and the population is dynamic due to the…
What type of delegation contract should be offered when facing a risk of the magnitude of the pandemic we are currently experiencing and how does the likelihood of an exogenous early termination of the relationship modify the terms of a…