Related papers: Adversarial Elicitation
We consider an outsourcing problem where a software agent procures multiple services from providers with uncertain reliabilities to complete a computational task before a strict deadline. The service consumer requires a procurement strategy…
Persuasion, defined as the act of exploiting an informational advantage in order to effect the decisions of others, is ubiquitous. Indeed, persuasive communication has been estimated to account for almost a third of all economic activity in…
We study information design in games where players choose from a continuum of actions and have continuously differentiable payoffs. We show that an information structure is optimal when the equilibrium it induces can also be implemented in…
This paper studies delegation in a model of discrete choice. In the delegation problem, an uninformed principal must consult an informed agent to make a decision. Both the agent and principal have preferences over the decided-upon action…
Many payment platforms hold large-scale marketing campaigns, which allocate incentives to encourage users to pay through their applications. To maximize the return on investment, incentive allocations are commonly solved in a two-stage…
We introduce \emph{informational punishment} to the design of mechanisms that compete with an exogenous status quo mechanism: Players can send garbled public messages with some delay, and others cannot commit to ignoring them. Optimal…
We investigate the management of information provision to maximize user engagement. A principal sequentially reveals signals to an agent who has a limited amount of information processing capacity and can choose to exit at any time. We…
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…
We consider a ubiquitous scenario in the Internet economy when individual decision-makers (henceforth, agents) both produce and consume information as they make strategic choices in an uncertain environment. This creates a three-way…
We propose a generic mechanism for incentivizing behavior in an arbitrary finite game using payments. Doing so is trivial if the mechanism is allowed to observe all actions taken in the game, as this allows it to simply punish those agents…
We study the selection of agents based on mutual nominations, a theoretical problem with many applications from committee selection to AI alignment. As agents both select and are selected, they may be incentivized to misrepresent their true…
We introduce and study the persuasive calibration problem, where a principal aims to provide trustworthy predictions about underlying events to a downstream agent to make desired decisions. We adopt the standard calibration framework that…
To take advantage of strategy commitment, a useful tactic of playing games, a leader must learn enough information about the follower's payoff function. However, this leaves the follower a chance to provide fake information and influence…
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…
Agents rarely act in isolation -- their behavioral history, in particular, is public to others. We seek a non-asymptotic understanding of how a leader agent should shape this history to its maximal advantage, knowing that follower agent(s)…
Motivating careerists is challenging for political organizations. Without explicit contracts, careerists often pander to public opinions or their superiors' preferences. Worse, when tasked with implementing these distorted decisions, they…
We consider the theoretical problem of designing an optimal adversarial attack on a decision system that maximally degrades the achievable performance of the system as measured by the mutual information between the degraded signal and the…
An indivisible object may be sold to one of $n$ agents who know their valuations of the object. The seller would like to use a revenue-maximizing mechanism but her knowledge of the valuations' distribution is scarce: she knows only the…
I study a repeated game in which a patient player (e.g., a seller) wants to win the trust of some myopic opponents (e.g., buyers) but can strictly benefit from betraying them. Her benefit from betrayal is strictly positive and is her…
In the private values single object auction model, we construct a satisfactory mechanism - a symmetric, dominant strategy incentive compatible, and budget-balanced mechanism. Our mechanism allocates the object to the highest valued agent…