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Firms have access to abundant data on market participants. They use these data to target contracts to agents with specific characteristics, and describe these contracts in opaque terms. In response to such practices, recent proposed…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2023-02-01 Andreas Haupt , Zoe Hitzig

We study hidden-action principal-agent problems with multiple agents. These are problems in which a principal commits to an outcome-dependent payment scheme in order to incentivize some agents to take costly, unobservable actions that lead…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-02-01 Matteo Castiglioni , Alberto Marchesi , Nicola Gatti

Persuasion studies how an informed principal may influence the behavior of agents by the strategic provision of payoff-relevant information. We focus on the fundamental multi-receiver model by Arieli and Babichenko (2019), in which there…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2020-04-01 Matteo Castiglioni , Andrea Celli , Nicola Gatti

In the combinatorial-action contract model (D\"utting et al., FOCS'21) a principal delegates the execution of a complex project to an agent, who can choose any subset from a given set of actions. Each set of actions incurs a cost to the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-11-27 Paul Dütting , Michal Feldman , Yoav Gal-Tzur , Aviad Rubinstein

We show that in delegation problems, a principal benefits from belief misalignment vis-\`a-vis an agent when the latter can flexibly acquire costly information. The agent optimally succumbs to confirmatory learning, leading him to favor the…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-07-30 Pavel Ilinov , Andrei Matveenko , Maxim Senkov , Egor Starkov

We study the problem of a principal who wants to influence an agent's observable action, subject to an ex-post budget. The agent has a private type determining their cost function. This paper endogenizes the value of the resource driving…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2024-04-25 Nicole Immorlica , Nicholas Wu , Brendan Lucier

We study an abstract optimal auction problem for a single good or service. This problem includes environments where agents have budgets, risk preferences, or multi-dimensional preferences over several possible configurations of the good…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2012-03-23 Saeed Alaei , Hu Fu , Nima Haghpanah , Jason Hartline , Azarakhsh Malekian

We consider the problem of estimating the possibly non-convex cost of an agent by observing its interactions with a nonlinear, non-stationary and stochastic environment. For this inverse problem, we give a result that allows to estimate the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-07-24 Émiland Garrabé , Hozefa Jesawada , Carmen Del Vecchio , Giovanni Russo

We consider cooperative multi-agent consensus optimization problems over both static and time-varying communication networks, where only local communications are allowed. The objective is to minimize the sum of agent-specific possibly…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-06-27 Erfan Yazdandoost Hamedani , Necdet Serhat Aybat

We examine hypothesis testing within a principal-agent framework, where a strategic agent, holding private beliefs about the effectiveness of a product, submits data to a principal who decides on approval. The principal employs a hypothesis…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-06 Safwan Hossain , Yatong Chen , Yiling Chen

Procrustes problems are matrix approximation problems searching for a~transformation of the given dataset to fit another dataset. They find applications in numerous areas, such as factor and multivariate analysis, computer vision,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-05-01 Terézia Fulová , Mária Trnovská

Imagine a large firm with multiple departments that plans a large recruitment. Candidates arrive one-by-one, and for each candidate the firm decides, based on her data (CV, skills, experience, etc), whether to summon her for an interview.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-03 Alon Cohen , Avinatan Hassidim , Haim Kaplan , Yishay Mansour , Shay Moran

We study problems arising in real-time auction markets, common in e-commerce and computational advertising, where bidders face the problem of calculating optimal bids. We focus upon a contract management problem where a demand aggregator is…

Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science · Computer Science 2022-06-28 Ryan J. Kinnear , Ravi R. Mazumdar , Peter Marbach

How should an agent (the sender) observing multi-dimensional data (the state vector) persuade another agent to take the desired action? We show that it is always optimal for the sender to perform a (non-linear) dimension reduction by…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2022-10-05 Semyon Malamud , Andreas Schrimpf

The system operator's scheduling problem in electricity markets, called unit commitment, is a non-convex mixed-integer program. The optimal value function is non-convex, preventing the application of traditional marginal pricing theory to…

General Economics · Economics 2024-10-03 Conleigh Byers , Brent Eldridge

A set of objects is to be divided fairly among agents with different tastes, modeled by additive utility-functions. If we consider the objects as indivisible, many instances of the decision problem: ``Is there a fair division of the objects…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-07-03 Samuel Bismuth , Ivan Bliznets , Erel Segal-Halevi

We study how market segmentation affects consumers when a monopolist can adjust both prices and product qualities across segments, engaging in second- and third-degree price discrimination simultaneously. We characterize the…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-03-04 Dirk Bergemann , Tibor Heumann , Michael C. Wang

We consider cooperative multi-agent consensus optimization problems over an undirected network of agents, where only those agents connected by an edge can directly communicate. The objective is to minimize the sum of agent-specific…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-07-12 Necdet Serhat Aybat , Erfan Yazdandoost Hamedani

Many regulatory and analytic problems require that a prohibited variable influence a decision only through a designated allowable channel -- a conditional-independence requirement that arises in path-specific fairness, the handling of…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2026-05-19 Zou Yang , Sophia Xiao , Bijan Mazaheri

The aims of this study are twofold. First, we consider an optimal risk allocation problem with non-convex preferences. By establishing an infimal representation for distortion risk measures, we give some necessary and sufficient conditions…

Risk Management · Quantitative Finance 2015-03-17 Hirbod Assa