English
Related papers

Related papers: Adversarial Elicitation

200 papers

This work considers a repeated principal-agent bandit game, where the principal can only interact with her environment through the agent. The principal and the agent have misaligned objectives and the choice of action is only left to the…

A privately-informed sender can commit to any disclosure policy towards a receiver. We show that full disclosure is optimal under a sufficient condition with some desirable properties. First, it speaks directly to the utility functions of…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2023-02-15 Emiliano Catonini , Sergey Stepanov

The hidden-action model captures a fundamental problem of principal-agent theory and provides an optimal sharing rule when only the outcome but not the effort can be observed. However, the hidden-action model builds on various explicit and…

General Economics · Economics 2020-04-15 Stephan Leitner , Friederike Wall

We consider a model of a data broker selling information to a single agent to maximize his revenue. The agent has a private valuation of the additional information, and upon receiving the signal from the data broker, the agent can conduct…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2023-08-08 Yingkai Li

We study a setting in which a principal selects an agent to execute a collection of tasks according to a specified priority sequence. Agents, however, have their own individual priority sequences according to which they wish to execute the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-10-30 Donya G. Dobakhshari , Lav R. Varshney , Vijay Gupta

This paper studies the design of optimal proper scoring rules when the principal has partial knowledge of an agent's signal distribution. Recent work characterizes the proper scoring rules that maximize the increase of an agent's payoff…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-10-15 Yiling Chen , Fang-Yi Yu

In this work we investigate the inefficiency of the electricity system with strategic agents. Specifically, we prove that without a proper control the total demand of an inefficient system is at most twice the total demand of the optimal…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2015-09-10 Carlos Barreto , Eduardo Mojica-Nava , Nicanor Quijano

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-08 Siyu Chen , Jibang Wu , Yifan Wu , Zhuoran Yang

Linear contracts are ubiquitous in practice, yet optimal contract theory often prescribes complex, nonlinear structures. We provide a distributional robustness justification for linear contracts. We study a principal-agent problem where the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Shiliang Zuo

We analyze a model of selling a single object to a principal-agent pair who want to acquire the object for a firm. The principal and the agent have different assessments of the object's value to the firm. The agent is budget-constrained…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2024-10-07 Debasis Mishra , Kolagani Paramahamsa

Strategic learning studies how decision rules interact with agents who may strategically change their inputs/features to achieve better outcomes. In standard settings, models assume that the decision-maker's sole scope is to learn a…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Valia Efthymiou , Ekaterina Fedorova , Chara Podimata

Recently, Frazier et al. proposed a natural model for crowdsourced exploration of different a priori unknown options: a principal is interested in the long-term welfare of a population of agents who arrive one by one in a multi-armed bandit…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2015-12-29 Li Han , David Kempe , Ruixin Qiang

A principal uses payments conditioned on stochastic outcomes of a team project to elicit costly effort from the team members. We develop a multi-agent generalization of a classic first-order approach to contract optimization by leveraging…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-03-13 Krishna Dasaratha , Benjamin Golub , Anant Shah

This paper considers the hidden-action model of the principal-agent problem, in which a principal incentivizes an agent to work on a project using a contract. We investigate whether contracts with bounded payments are learnable and…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-02-23 Yurong Chen , Zhaohua Chen , Xiaotie Deng , Zhiyi Huang

We define a model of interactive communication where two agents with private types can exchange information before a game is played. The model contains Bayesian persuasion as a special case of a one-round communication protocol. We define…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2021-06-07 Jieming Mao , Renato Paes Leme , Kangning Wang

We study a class of finite-action disclosure games in which the sender's preferences are state-independent and the receiver's optimal action depends only on the expected state. While receiver-preferred equilibria in these games involve full…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-05-06 Denis Shishkin , Maria Titova , Kun Zhang

AI systems often rely on two key components: a specified goal or reward function and an optimization algorithm to compute the optimal behavior for that goal. This approach is intended to provide value for a principal: the user on whose…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2021-02-09 Simon Zhuang , Dylan Hadfield-Menell

An agent choosing between various actions tends to take the one with the lowest cost. But this choice is arguably too rigid (not adaptive) to be useful in complex situations, e.g., where exploration-exploitation trade-off is relevant in…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2018-12-04 Armen E. Allahverdyan , Aram Galstyan , Ali E. Abbas , Zbigniew R. Struzik

We study the robustness of cheap-talk equilibria to infinitesimal private information of the receiver in a model with a binary state-space and state-independent sender-preferences. We show that the sender-optimal equilibrium is robust if…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2023-02-02 Itai Arieli , Ronen Gradwohl , Rann Smorodinsky

Game theory serves as a powerful tool for distributed optimization in multi-agent systems in different applications. In this paper we consider multi-agent systems that can be modeled by means of potential games whose potential function…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-04-13 Tatiana Tatarenko