In applications such as participatory sensing and crowd sensing, self-interested agents exert costly effort towards achieving an objective for the system operator. We study such a setup where a principal incentivizes multiple agents of different types who can collude with each other to derive rent. The principal cannot observe the efforts exerted directly, but only the outcome of the task, which is a noisy function of the effort. The type of each agent influences the effort cost and task output. For a duopoly in which agents are coupled in their payments, we show that if the principal and the agents interact finitely many times, the agents can derive rent by colluding even if the principal knows the types of the agents. However, if the principal and the agents interact infinitely often, the principal can disincentivize agent collusion through a suitable data-driven contract.
翻译:在参与性感测和人群感测等应用中,自我感兴趣的代理人为实现系统操作者的目标付出了昂贵的努力。我们研究了这样一种机制,即主要激励多种不同类型的代理人相互勾结以获得租金。本金无法观察直接作出的努力,但只能观察任务的结果,这是工作的一个噪音功能。每种代理人的类型影响工作的成本和任务产出。对于一种双轨做法,即代理人在付款中相互配合,我们表明,如果本金和代理人互动的次数有限,即使本金知道代理人的类型,他们也可以通过串通获得租金。然而,如果本金和代理人经常相互作用,本金可以通过适当的数据驱动合同使代理人相互勾结失去动力。