Abstract: In many multiagent domains a set of agents exert effort towards a joint outcome, yet the individual effort levels cannot be easily observed. A typical example for such a scenario is routing in communication networks, where the sender can only observe whether the packet reached its destination, but often has no information about the actions of the intermediate routers, which influences the final outcome. We study a setting where a principal needs to motivate a team of agents whose combination of hidden efforts stochastically determines an outcome. In a companion paper we devise and study a basic combinatorial agency model for this setting, where the principal is restricted to inducing a pure Nash equilibrium. Here we study various implications of this restriction. First, we show that, in contrast to the case of observable efforts, inducing a mixed-strategies equilibrium may be beneficial for the principal. Second, we present a sufficient condition for technologies for which no gain can be generated. Third, we bound the principals gain for various families of technologies. Finally, we study the robustness of mixed equilibria to coalitional deviations and the computational hardness of the optimal mixed equilibria.
Recommendations
Cited in
(22)- Crowd computing as a cooperation problem: An evolutionary approach
- Bayesian agency: linear versus tractable contracts
- Fault tolerant mechanism design
- On the Existence of Low-Rank Explanations for Mixed Strategy Behavior
- Combinatorial agency of threshold functions
- Free-riding and free-labor in combinatorial agency
- Combinatorial agency
- Algorithms and mechanisms for procuring services with uncertain durations using redundancy
- scientific article; zbMATH DE number 2209529 (Why is no real title available?)
- Learning approximately optimal contracts
- Learning approximately optimal contracts
- Designing menus of contracts efficiently: the power of randomization
- Verifiable crowd computing: coping with bounded rationality
- Multi-agent contracts
- Improved approximation algorithms for combinatorial contracts with type constraints
- Combinatorial contracts
- Approximating continuous multi-agent contracts with Lyapunov function methods
- Approximating combinatorial contracts with a cardinality constraint
- Approximating principal-agent problem under Bayesian
- Algorithmic contract theory: a survey
- Computing optimal contracts in combinatorial agencies
- Multi-agent contracts
This page was built for publication: Mixed strategies in combinatorial agency
Report a bug (only for logged in users!)Click here to report a bug for this page (MaRDI item Q3579358)
