Theory Lunch This Week (2/19, GCS 502c, 12:00)

[Grayson York]

Hi all,

Please join us for theory lunch this week in GCS 502c on Thursday at 12:00 for Curtis Bechtel's thesis proposal. The title and abstract for the proposal are as follows. 

Thanks,

G

Title: Incentivizing Efficient Delegation without Payments

Abstract: In delegation problems, a principal wants to search through a stochastic space of feasible solutions for one maximizing their utility, but they lack the ability to conduct this search on their own. Instead, they must delegate this search problem to one or more untrusted agents with distinct utility functions. The principal is then faced with the problem of designing a mechanism that incentivizes agents to find and propose a solution maximizing their utility. Importantly, the principal's power is limited to announcing which feasible solutions they would accept or reject, so we don't allow the principal to offer direct transfers of value, either positive or negative, for any outcome. Despite this limitation, there often exist mechanisms under which the principal is guaranteed a constant-factor approximation of their first-best utility. In this work, we propose three broad approaches to modeling delegation problems that address different aspects of the problem: combinatorial search and solution constraints, additive costs for searching, and delegating to multiple agents. We then show how the principal can achieve competitive approximations for several variants of each of these approaches.

[Grayson York]

Hi all,

Please join at the following zoom link:

https://usc.zoom.us/j/8561565993?pwd=LzhDWnY2citubmtyQXR1NnVtK0ZaQT09