Related papers: Adversarial Elicitation
We study principal-agent problems where a farsighted agent takes costly actions in an MDP. The core challenge in these settings is that agent's actions are hidden to the principal, who can only observe their outcomes, namely state…
We consider settings where an uninformed principal must hear arguments from two better-informed agents, corresponding to two possible courses of action that they argue for. The arguments are verifiable in the sense that the true state of…
We analyze a two-period principal-agent model in which the principal faces a budget constraint, and the agent's private costs of performing tasks across the two periods may be correlated. We examine the optimal design of the reward scheme…
Information that is of relevance for decision-making is often distributed, and held by self-interested agents. Decision markets are well-suited mechanisms to elicit such information and aggregate it into conditional forecasts that can be…
This paper proposes the notion of robust PBE in a general competing mechanism game of incomplete information where a mechanism allows its designer to send a message to himself at the same time agents send messages. It identifies the utility…
We introduce a dynamic mechanism design problem in which the designer wants to offer for sale an item to an agent, and another item to the same agent at some point in the future. The agent's joint distribution of valuations for the two…
In this paper we study the implementation challenge in an abstract interdependent values model and an arbitrary objective function. We design a mechanism that allows for approximate optimal implementation of insensitive objective functions…
Commitments play a crucial role in game theory, shaping strategic interactions by either altering a player's own payoffs or influencing the incentives of others through outcome-contingent payments. While most research has focused on using…
Aligning AI systems with human values remains a fundamental challenge, but does our inability to create perfectly aligned models preclude obtaining the benefits of alignment? We study a strategic setting where a human user interacts with…
Originating in evolutionary game theory, the class of "zero-determinant" strategies enables a player to unilaterally enforce linear payoff relationships in simple repeated games. An upshot of this kind of payoff constraint is that it can…
We are interested in the problem of optimal commitments in rank-and-bid based auctions, a general class of auctions that include first price and all-pay auctions as special cases. Our main contribution is a novel approach to solve for…
We study a scenario where an adjudication task (e.g., the resolution of a binary dispute) is outsourced to a set of agents who are appointed as jurors. This scenario is particularly relevant in a Web3 environment, where no verification of…
I study whether and which expert incentives can be provided at what cost when the states of the world become non-contractible, but there is some noisy observation about the states that can be contracted upon. A principal hires an agent to…
In cooperative multiagent planning, it can often be beneficial for an agent to make commitments about aspects of its behavior to others, allowing them in turn to plan their own behaviors without taking the agent's detailed behavior into…
Contract theory typically assumes full commitment by the principal, but many contracts fix some payoff-relevant decisions while leaving others discretionary. We ask when imperfect commitment is equivalent to full commitment. For contracts…
In practice, most mechanisms for selling, buying, matching, voting, and so on are not incentive compatible. We present techniques for estimating how far a mechanism is from incentive compatible. Given samples from the agents' type…
We study the problem of implementing equilibria of complete information games in settings of incomplete information, and address this problem using "recommender mechanisms." A recommender mechanism is one that does not have the power to…
Incentive design deals with interaction between a principal and an agent where the former can shape the latter's utility through a policy commitment. It is well known that the principal faces an information rent when dealing with an agent…
We consider the fundamental scenario where a single item is to be sold to one of two agents. Both agents draw their valuation for the item from the same probability distribution. However, only one of them submits a bid to the mechanism. The…
In the combinatorial-action contract model (D\"utting et al., FOCS'21) a principal delegates the execution of a complex project to an agent, who can choose any subset from a given set of actions. Each set of actions incurs a cost to the…