Efficient Multi-Agent Delegated Search

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Bechtel, Curtis, Dughmi, Shaddin
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Bechtel, Curtis
Dughmi, Shaddin
author_facet Bechtel, Curtis
Dughmi, Shaddin
contents Consider a principal who wants to search through a space of stochastic solutions for one maximizing their utility. If the principal cannot conduct this search on their own, they may instead delegate this problem to an agent with distinct and potentially misaligned utilities. This is called delegated search, and the principal in such problems faces a mechanism design problem in which they must incentivize the agent to find and propose a solution maximizing the principal's expected utility. Following prior work in this area, we consider mechanisms without payments and aim to achieve a multiplicative approximation of the principal's utility when they solve the problem without delegation. In this work, we investigate a natural and recently studied generalization of this model to multiple agents and find nearly tight bounds on the principal's approximation as the number of agents increases. As one might expect, this approximation approaches 1 with increasing numbers of agents, but, somewhat surprisingly, we show that this is largely not due to direct competition among agents.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2411_00181
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Efficient Multi-Agent Delegated Search
Bechtel, Curtis
Dughmi, Shaddin
Computer Science and Game Theory
Consider a principal who wants to search through a space of stochastic solutions for one maximizing their utility. If the principal cannot conduct this search on their own, they may instead delegate this problem to an agent with distinct and potentially misaligned utilities. This is called delegated search, and the principal in such problems faces a mechanism design problem in which they must incentivize the agent to find and propose a solution maximizing the principal's expected utility. Following prior work in this area, we consider mechanisms without payments and aim to achieve a multiplicative approximation of the principal's utility when they solve the problem without delegation. In this work, we investigate a natural and recently studied generalization of this model to multiple agents and find nearly tight bounds on the principal's approximation as the number of agents increases. As one might expect, this approximation approaches 1 with increasing numbers of agents, but, somewhat surprisingly, we show that this is largely not due to direct competition among agents.
title Efficient Multi-Agent Delegated Search
topic Computer Science and Game Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.00181