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We consider a principal agent project selection problem with asymmetric information. There are $N$ projects and the principal must select exactly one of them. Each project provides some profit to the principal and some payoff to the agent…
If we could define the set of all bad outcomes, we could hard-code an agent which avoids them; however, in sufficiently complex environments, this is infeasible. We do not know of any general-purpose approaches in the literature to avoiding…
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…
In a multi-agent system, an agent's optimal policy will typically depend on the policies chosen by others. Therefore, a key issue in multi-agent systems research is that of predicting the behaviours of others, and responding promptly to…
Models of economic decision makers often include idealized assumptions, such as rationality, perfect foresight, and access to all relevant pieces of information. These assumptions often assure the models' internal validity, but, at the same…
We investigate the problem of a principal looking to contract an expert to provide a probability forecast for a categorical event. We assume all experts have a common public prior on the event's probability, but can form more accurate…
Traditional approaches to the design of multi-agent navigation algorithms consider the environment as a fixed constraint, despite the influence of spatial constraints on agents' performance. Yet hand-designing conducive environment layouts…
End-users' trust in automated agents is important as automated decision-making and planning is increasingly used in many aspects of people's lives. In real-world applications of planning, multiple optimization objectives are often involved.…
How best to incentivise prompt disclosure? We study this question in a general model in which a technological breakthrough occurs at an uncertain time and is privately observed by an agent, and a principal must incentivise disclosure via…
Environments with fixed adjustment costs such as transaction costs or \lq menu costs\rq$ $ are widespread within economic systems. The presence of fixed minimal adjustment costs produces adjustment stickiness so that agents must choose a…
Self-evolving agents offer a promising path toward scalable autonomy. However, in this work, we show that in competitive environments, self-evolution can instead give rise to a serious and previously underexplored risk: the spontaneous…
Mixed incentives among a population with multiagent teams has been shown to have advantages over a fully cooperative system; however, discovering the best mixture of incentives or team structure is a difficult and dynamic problem. We…
We initiate the study of a repeated principal-agent problem over a finite horizon $T$, where a principal sequentially interacts with $K\geq 2$ types of agents arriving in an adversarial order. At each round, the principal strategically…
Agents that learn to select optimal actions represent a prominent focus of the sequential decision-making literature. In the face of a complex environment or constraints on time and resources, however, aiming to synthesize such an optimal…
We consider a contracting problem in which a principal hires an agent to manage a risky project. When the agent chooses volatility components of the output process and the principal observes the output continuously, the principal can…
We propose a tractable unified framework to study the evolution and interaction of model-misspecification concerns and complexity aversion in repeated decision problems. This aims to capture environments where decision makers worry that…
The aim of path planning is to reach the goal from starting point by searching for the route of an agent. In the path planning, the routes may vary depending on the number of variables such that it is important for the agent to reach…
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…
We consider the design of experiments to evaluate treatments that are administered by self-interested agents, each seeking to achieve the highest evaluation and win the experiment. For example, in an advertising experiment, a company wishes…
Principal-agent problems arise when one party acts on behalf of another, leading to conflicts of interest. The economic literature has extensively studied principal-agent problems, and recent work has extended this to more complex scenarios…