Mechanism Design for Task Delegation to Agents with Private Ordering Preferences
Dobakhshari, Donya G. ; Varshney, Lav R. ; Gupta, Vijay
arXiv, Tome 2019 (2019) no. 0, / Harvested from
A principal selects a group of agents to execute a collection of tasks according to a specified order. Agents, however, have their own individual ordering preferences according to which they wish to execute the tasks. There is information asymmetry since each of these ordering preferences is private knowledge for the individual agent. The private nature of the priorities of the individual agents (adverse selection) leads to the effort expended by the agents to change from the initial preferred priority to the realized one to also be hidden as well (moral hazard). We design a mechanism for selecting agents and incentivizing the selected agents to realize a priority sequence for executing the tasks that achieves socially optimal performance in the system, i.e., maximizes collective utility of the agents and the principal. Our proposed mechanism consists of two parts. First the principal runs an auction to select some agents to allocate the tasks, based on the ordering preference they bid. Each task is allocated to one agent. Then, the principal rewards the agents according to the realized order with which the tasks were performed. We show that the proposed mechanism is individually rational and incentive compatible. Further, it is also socially optimal under linear cost of ordering preference modification by the agents.
Publié le : 2019-01-31
Classification:  Mathematics - Optimization and Control
@article{1902.00138,
     author = {Dobakhshari, Donya G. and Varshney, Lav R. and Gupta, Vijay},
     title = {Mechanism Design for Task Delegation to Agents with Private Ordering
  Preferences},
     journal = {arXiv},
     volume = {2019},
     number = {0},
     year = {2019},
     language = {en},
     url = {http://dml.mathdoc.fr/item/1902.00138}
}
Dobakhshari, Donya G.; Varshney, Lav R.; Gupta, Vijay. Mechanism Design for Task Delegation to Agents with Private Ordering
  Preferences. arXiv, Tome 2019 (2019) no. 0, . http://gdmltest.u-ga.fr/item/1902.00138/