Structural Approach to Guiding a Present-Biased Agent

Time-inconsistent behavior, such as procrastination or abandonment of long-term goals, arises when agents evaluate immediate outcomes disproportionately higher than future ones. This leads to globally suboptimal behavior, where plans are frequently revised or abandoned entirely. In the influential model of Kleinberg and Oren (2014) such behavior is modeled by a present-biased agent navigating a task graph toward a goal, making locally optimal decisions at each step based on discounted future costs. As a result, the agent may repeatedly deviate from initially intended plans.

Recent work by Belova et al. (2024) introduced a two-agent extension of this model, where a fully-aware principal attempts to guide the present-biased agent through a specific set of critical tasks without causing abandonment. This captures a rich class of principal–agent dynamics in behavioral settings.

In this paper, we provide a comprehensive algorithmic characterization of this problem. We analyze its computational complexity through the framework of parameterized algorithms, focusing on graph parameters that naturally emerge in this setting, such as treewidth, vertex cover, and feedback vertex set. Our main result is a fixed-parameter tractable algorithm when parameterized by the treewidth of the task graph and the number of distinct (v,t)-path costs. Our algorithm encaptures several input settings, such as bounded edge costs and restricted task graph structure. We demonstrate that our main result yields efficient algorithms for a number of such configurations.

We complement this with tight hardness results, that highlight the extreme difficulty of the problem even on simplest graphs with bounded number of nodes and constant parameter values, and motivate our choice of parameters. We delineate tractable and intractable regions of the problem landscape, which include answers to open questions of Belova et al. (2024).