Related papers: Decomposing Common Agency
In multi-agent problems requiring a high degree of cooperation, success often depends on the ability of the agents to adapt to each other's behavior. A natural solution concept in such settings is the Stackelberg equilibrium, in which the…
We study hidden-action principal-agent problems with multiple agents. These are problems in which a principal commits to an outcome-dependent payment scheme in order to incentivize some agents to take costly, unobservable actions that lead…
A simple model for cooperation between "selfish" agents, which play an extended version of the Prisoner's Dilemma(PD) game, in which they use arbitrary payoffs, is presented and studied. A continuous variable, representing the probability…
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…
One approach for improving sample efficiency in cooperative multi-agent learning is to decompose overall tasks into sub-tasks that can be assigned to individual agents. We study this problem in the context of reward machines: symbolic tasks…
This paper seeks to establish a framework for directing a society of simple, specialized, self-interested agents to solve what traditionally are posed as monolithic single-agent sequential decision problems. What makes it challenging to use…
Decomposition methods have been proposed to approximate solutions to large sequential decision making problems. In contexts where an agent interacts with multiple entities, utility decomposition can be used to separate the global objective…
We study hidden-action principal-agent problems in which a principal commits to an outcome-dependent payment scheme (called contract) so as to incentivize the agent to take a costly, unobservable action leading to favorable outcomes. In…
We study incentive design when multiple principals simultaneously design mechanisms for their respective teams in environments with strategic spillovers. In this environment, each principal's set of incentive-compatible mechanisms--those…
We consider a multi-agent delegation mechanism without money. In our model, given a set of agents, each agent has a fixed number of solutions which is exogenous to the mechanism, and privately sends a signal, e.g., a subset of solutions, to…
In delegation problems, a principal does not have the resources necessary to complete a particular task, so they delegate the task to an untrusted agent whose interests may differ from their own. Given any family of such problems and space…
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…
In the distributed optimization problem for a multi-agent system, each agent knows a local function and must find a minimizer of the sum of all agents' local functions by performing a combination of local gradient evaluations and…
We study secretary problems in settings with multiple agents. In the standard secretary problem, a sequence of arbitrary awards arrive online, in a random order, and a single decision maker makes an immediate and irrevocable decision…
We study a simple problem of allocating common-value goods. The designer seeks to allocate the goods to as many unit-demand agents as possible without monetary transfers, while agents, who possess partial private information about the…
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…
A principal must decide between two options. Which one she prefers depends on the private information of two agents. One agent always prefers the first option; the other always prefers the second. Transfers are infeasible. One application…
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…
This work develops a fully decentralized multi-agent algorithm for policy evaluation. The proposed scheme can be applied to two distinct scenarios. In the first scenario, a collection of agents have distinct datasets gathered following…
A solution concept on a class of transferable utility coalitional games is a multifunction satisfying given criteria of economic rationality. Every solution associates a set of payoff allocations with a coalitional game. This general…