Delegating to Multiple Agents

MohammadTaghi Hajiaghayi, Keivan Rezaei and Suho Shin

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: 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 the principal. Then, the principal selects a final solution based on the agents' signals. In stark contrast to single-agent setting by Kleinberg and Kleinberg (EC'18) with an approximate Bayesian mechanism, we show that there exists efficient approximate prior-independent mechanisms with both information and performance gain, thanks to the competitive tension between the agents. Interestingly, however, the amount of such a compelling power significantly varies with respect to the information available to the agents, and the degree of correlation between the principal's and the agent's utility. Technically, we conduct a comprehensive study on the multi-agent delegation problem and derive several results on the approximation factors of Bayesian/prior-independent mechanisms in complete/incomplete information settings. As a special case of independent interest, we obtain comparative statics regarding the number of agents which implies the dominance of the multi-agent setting ($n \ge 2$) over the single-agent setting ($n=1$) in terms of the principal's utility. We further extend our problem by considering an examination cost of the mechanism and derive some analogous results in the complete information setting.

Date: 2023-05, Revised 2023-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cta, nep-des, nep-mic and nep-upt
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://arxiv.org/pdf/2305.03203 Latest version (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:arx:papers:2305.03203

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().