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Incentives, Equilibria, and the Limits of Healthcare AI: A Game-Theoretic Perspective

arXiv:2603.28825v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Artificial intelligence (AI) is widely promoted as a promising technological response to healthcare capacity and productivity pressures. Deployment of AI systems carries significant costs including ongoing costs of monitoring and whether optimism of a deus ex machina solution is well-placed is unclear. This paper proposes three archetypal AI technology types: AI for effort reduction, AI to increase observability, and mechanism-level incentive change AI. Using a stylised inpatient capacity signalling example and minimal game-theoretic reasoning, it argues that task optimisation alone is unlikely to change system outcomes when incentives are unchanged. The analysis highlights why only interventions that reshape risk allocation can plausibly shift stable system-level behaviour, and outlines implications for healthcare leadership and procurement.

AI-Generated Compromises for Coalition Formation

arXiv:2506.06837v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The challenge of finding compromises between agent proposals is fundamental to AI subfields such as argumentation, mediation, and negotiation. Building on this tradition, Elkind et al. (2021) introduced a process for coalition formation that seeks majority-supported proposals preferable to the status quo, using a metric space where each agent has an ideal point. A crucial step in this process involves identifying compromise proposals around which agent coalitions can unite. How to effectively find such compromise proposals remains an open question. We address this gap by formalizing a model that incorporates agent bounded rationality and uncertainty, and by developing AI methods to generate compromise proposals. We focus on the domain of collaborative document writing, such as the democratic drafting of a community constitution. Our approach uses natural language processing techniques and large language models to induce a semantic metric space over text. Based on this space, we design algorithms to suggest compromise points likely to receive broad support. To evaluate our methods, we simulate coalition formation processes and show that AI can facilitate large-scale democratic text editing, a domain where traditional tools are limited.

Sample-Efficient Hypergradient Estimation for Decentralized Bi-Level Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2603.14867v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Many strategic decision-making problems, such as environment design for warehouse robots, can be naturally formulated as bi-level reinforcement learning (RL), where a leader agent optimizes its objective while a follower solves a Markov decision process (MDP) conditioned on the leader's decisions. In many situations, a fundamental challenge arises when the leader cannot intervene in the follower's optimization process; it can only observe the optimization outcome. We address this decentralized setting by deriving the hypergradient of the leader's objective, i.e., the gradient of the leader's strategy that accounts for changes in the follower's optimal policy. Unlike prior hypergradient-based methods that require extensive data for repeated state visits or rely on gradient estimators whose complexity can increase substantially with the high-dimensional leader's decision space, we leverage the Boltzmann covariance trick to derive an alternative hypergradient formulation. This enables efficient hypergradient estimation solely from interaction samples, even when the leader's decision space is high-dimensional. Additionally, to our knowledge, this is the first method that enables hypergradient-based optimization for 2-player Markov games in decentralized settings. Experiments highlight the impact of hypergradient updates and demonstrate our method's effectiveness in both discrete and continuous state tasks.
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