Related papers: Obviously Strategy-Proof Multi-Dimensional Allocat…
We consider the egalitarian welfare aspects of random assignment mechanisms when agents have unrestricted cardinal utilities over the objects. We give bounds on how well different random assignment mechanisms approximate the optimal…
We consider task allocation for multi-object transport using a multi-robot system, in which each robot selects one object among multiple objects with different and unknown weights. The existing centralized methods assume the number of…
This paper looks at predictability problems, i.e., wherein an agent must choose its strategy in order to optimize the predictions that an external observer could make. We address these problems while taking into account uncertainties on the…
This brief note considers the problem of learning with dynamic-optimizing principal-agent setting, in which the agents are allowed to have global perspectives about the learning process, i.e., the ability to view things according to their…
We consider a simple sequential allocation procedure for sharing indivisible items between agents in which agents take turns to pick items. Supposing additive utilities and independence between the agents, we show that the expected utility…
Consider the relationship between a regulator (the principal) and an experimenter (the agent) such as a pharmaceutical company. The pharmaceutical company wishes to sell a drug for profit, whereas the regulator wishes to allow only…
Fairness is desirable yet challenging to achieve within multi-agent systems, especially when agents differ in latent traits that affect their abilities. This hidden heterogeneity often leads to unequal distributions of wealth, even when…
We study a principal-agent team production model. The principal hires a team of agents to participate in a common production task. The exact effort of each agent is unobservable and unverifiable, but the total production outcome (e.g. the…
It is often argued that an agent making decisions on behalf of two or more principals who have different utility functions should adopt a {\em Pareto-optimal} policy, i.e., a policy that cannot be improved upon for one agent without making…
Catering to the incentives of people with limited rationality is a challenging research direction that requires novel paradigms to design mechanisms and approximation algorithms. Obviously strategyproof (OSP) mechanisms have recently…
Sequential allocation is a simple allocation mechanism in which agents are given pre-specified turns and each agents gets the most preferred item that is still available. It has long been known that sequential allocation is not…
We study the distributed facility location problem, where a set of agents with positions on the line of real numbers are partitioned into disjoint districts, and the goal is to choose a point to satisfy certain criteria, such as optimize an…
We study the problem of how to coordinate the actions of independent agents in a distributed system where message arrival times are unbounded, but are determined by an exponential probability distribution. Asynchronous protocols executed in…
The problem of controlling multi-agent systems under different models of information sharing among agents has received significant attention in the recent literature. In this paper, we consider a setup where rather than committing to a…
We study hidden-action principal-agent problems with multiple agents. These are problems in which a principal commits to an outcome-dependent payment scheme in order to incentivize some agents to take costly, unobservable actions that lead…
We study repeated task assignment as an instrument for providing effort incentives. Unlike traditional incentive instruments, assignment of a task both determines who produces and provides incentives, and incentives for one worker spill…
The Probabilistic Serial mechanism is well-known for its desirable fairness and efficiency properties. It is one of the most prominent protocols for the random assignment problem. However, Probabilistic Serial is not incentive-compatible,…
The problem of assigning agents to tasks is a central computational challenge in many multi-agent autonomous systems. However, in the real world, agents are not always perfect and may fail due to a number of reasons. A motivating…
We formulate and study the algorithmic mechanism design problem for a general class of resource allocation settings, where the center redistributes the private resources brought by individuals. Money transfer is forbidden. Distinct from the…
We revisit the discrete heterogeneous two-facility location problem, in which there is a set of agents that occupy nodes of a line graph, and have private approval preferences over two facilities. When the facilities are located at some…