Related papers: Social welfare optimisation in well-mixed and stru…
Understanding the emergence of prosocial behaviours among self-interested individuals is an important problem in many scientific disciplines. Various mechanisms have been proposed to explain the evolution of such behaviours, primarily…
We consider the problem of helping agents improve by setting short-term goals. Given a set of target skill levels, we assume each agent will try to improve from their initial skill level to the closest target level within reach or do…
In this paper, we rigorously study the problem of cost optimisation of hybrid (mixed) institutional incentives, which are a plan of actions involving the use of reward and punishment by an external decision-maker, for maximising the level…
Social dilemmas present a significant challenge in multi-agent cooperation because individuals are incentivised to behave in ways that undermine socially optimal outcomes. Consequently, self-interested agents often avoid collective…
Several behavioral, social, and public health interventions, such as suicide/HIV prevention or community preparedness against natural disasters, leverage social network information to maximize outreach. Algorithmic influence maximization…
A multiagent system may be thought of as an artificial society of autonomous software agents and we can apply concepts borrowed from welfare economics and social choice theory to assess the social welfare of such an agent society. In this…
Combined prosocial incentives, integrating reward for cooperators and punishment for defectors, are effective tools to promote cooperation among competing agents in population games. Existing research concentrated on how to adjust reward or…
This paper studies the connection between a class of mean-field games and a social welfare optimization problem. We consider a mean-field game in function spaces with a large population of agents, and each agent seeks to minimize an…
Motivated by applications such as college admission and insurance rate determination, we propose an evaluation problem where the inputs are controlled by strategic individuals who can modify their features at a cost. A learner can only…
We consider a regulator driving individual choices towards increasing social welfare by providing personal incentives. We formalise and solve this problem by maximising social welfare under a budget constraint. The personalised incentives…
In this paper, we study the problem of cost optimisation of individual-based institutional incentives (reward, punishment, and hybrid) for guaranteeing a certain minimal level of cooperative behaviour in a well-mixed, finite population. In…
Given an initial resource allocation, where some agents may envy others or where a different distribution of resources might lead to higher social welfare, our goal is to improve the allocation without reassigning resources. We consider a…
The application of incentives, such as reward and punishment, is a frequently applied way for promoting cooperation among interacting individuals in structured populations. However, how to properly use the incentives is still a challenging…
Institutions can provide incentives to increase cooperation behaviour in a population where this behaviour is infrequent. This process is costly, and it is thus important to optimize the overall spending. This problem can be mathematically…
We propose social welfare optimization as a general paradigm for formalizing fairness in AI systems. We argue that optimization models allow formulation of a wide range of fairness criteria as social welfare functions, while enabling AI to…
Many real-world systems such as taxi systems, traffic networks and smart grids involve self-interested actors that perform individual tasks in a shared environment. However, in such systems, the self-interested behaviour of agents produces…
The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into economic systems represents a transformative shift in decision-making frameworks, introducing novel dynamics between human and AI agents. This paper proposes a welfare model that…
We study the optimal joint intervention of a planner who can influence both the standalone marginal utilities of agents in a network and the weights of the links connecting them. The welfare-maximizing intervention displays two key…
We consider the problem of repeatedly choosing policies to maximize social welfare. Welfare is a weighted sum of private utility and public revenue. Earlier outcomes inform later policies. Utility is not observed, but indirectly inferred.…
A principal delegates a project to a team $S$ from a pool of $n$ agents. The project's value if all agents in $S$ exert costly effort is $f(S)$. To incentivize the agents to participate, the principal assigns each agent $i\in S$ a share…