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We consider a seller who offers services to a buyer with multi-unit demand. Prior to the realization of demand, the buyer receives a noisy signal of their future demand, and the seller can design contracts based on the reported value of…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-02-13 Dirk Bergemann , Michael C. Wang

Assortment optimization refers to the problem of designing a slate of products to offer potential customers, such as stocking the shelves in a convenience store. The price of each product is fixed in advance, and a probabilistic choice…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2017-11-09 Nicole Immorlica , Brendan Lucier , Jieming Mao , Vasilis Syrgkanis , Christos Tzamos

We study a multi-agent contract design problem with moral hazard. In our model, each agent exerts costly effort towards an individual task at which it may either succeed or fail, and the principal, who wishes to encourage effort, has an…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-07-09 Sumit Goel , Wade Hann-Caruthers

We consider the classical linear assignment problem, and we introduce new auction algorithms for its optimal and suboptimal solution. The algorithms are founded on duality theory, and are related to ideas of competitive bidding by persons…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-10-24 Dimitri Bertsekas

We study a continuous time contracting model in which a principal hires a risk averse agent to manage a project over a finite horizon and provides sequential payments whose timing is endogenously determined. The resulting nonzero-sum…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-12-01 Guillermo Alonso Alvarez , Ibrahim Ekren , Liwei Huang

The agency problem emerges in today's large scale machine learning tasks, where the learners are unable to direct content creation or enforce data collection. In this work, we propose a theoretical framework for aligning economic interests…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-03 Jibang Wu , Siyu Chen , Mengdi Wang , Huazheng Wang , Haifeng Xu

Many combinatorial optimization problems are often considered intractable to solve exactly or by approximation. An example of such problem is maximum clique which -- under standard assumptions in complexity theory -- cannot be solved in…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2021-07-27 Tapani Toivonen

The increasing deployment of AI is shaping the future landscape of the internet, which is set to become an integrated ecosystem of AI agents. Orchestrating the interaction among AI agents necessitates decentralized, self-sustaining…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Dima Ivanov , Paul Dütting , Inbal Talgam-Cohen , Tonghan Wang , David C. Parkes

Assignment problems are a classic combinatorial optimization problem in which a group of agents must be assigned to a group of tasks such that maximum utility is achieved while satisfying assignment constraints. Given the utility of each…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2024-12-23 Joshua Holder , Natasha Jaques , Mehran Mesbahi

A principal selects a team of agents for collaborating on a joint project. The principal aims to design a revenue-optimal contract that incentivize the team of agents to exert costly effort while satisfying fairness constraints. We show…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Matteo Castiglioni , Junjie Chen , Yingkai Li

In this paper, we initiate the computational problem of jointly designing information and contracts. We consider three possible classes of contracts with decreasing flexibility and increasing simplicity: ambiguous contracts, menus of…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-07-09 Matteo Castiglioni , Junjie Chen

When machine learning is outsourced to a rational agent, conflicts of interest might arise and severely impact predictive performance. In this work, we propose a theoretical framework for incentive-aware delegation of machine learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-07 Eden Saig , Inbal Talgam-Cohen , Nir Rosenfeld

We introduce a two-agent problem which is inspired by price asymmetry arising from funding difference. When two parties have different funding rates, the two parties deduce different fair prices for derivative contracts even under the same…

Mathematical Finance · Quantitative Finance 2020-01-01 Junbeom Lee , Stephan Sturm , Chao Zhou

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

Complements between goods - where one good takes on added value in the presence of another - have been a thorn in the side of algorithmic mechanism designers. On the one hand, complements are common in the standard motivating applications…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2012-05-21 Ittai Abraham , Moshe Babaioff , Shaddin Dughmi , Tim Roughgarden

We study an abstract optimal auction problem for a single good or service. This problem includes environments where agents have budgets, risk preferences, or multi-dimensional preferences over several possible configurations of the good…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2012-03-23 Saeed Alaei , Hu Fu , Nima Haghpanah , Jason Hartline , Azarakhsh Malekian

Constrained submodular set function maximization problems often appear in multi-agent decision-making problems with a discrete feasible set. A prominent example is the problem of multi-agent mobile sensor placement over a discrete domain.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-12-01 Navid Rezazadeh , Solmaz S. Kia

We propose to study electricity capacity remuneration mechanism design through a Principal-Agent approach. The Principal represents the aggregation of electricity consumers (or a representative entity), subject to the physical risk of…

General Economics · Economics 2020-09-02 Clémence Alasseur , Heythem Farhat , Marcelo Saguan

Resource balancing within complex transportation networks is one of the most important problems in real logistics domain. Traditional solutions on these problems leverage combinatorial optimization with demand and supply forecasting.…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2019-03-05 Xihan Li , Jia Zhang , Jiang Bian , Yunhai Tong , Tie-Yan Liu

A practical challenge in reinforcement learning are combinatorial action spaces that make planning computationally demanding. For example, in cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning, a potentially large number of agents jointly…