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We consider mechanisms for truthfully eliciting probabilistic predictions from a group of experts. The standard approach -- using a proper scoring rule to separately reward each expert -- is not robust to collusion: experts may collude to…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2021-09-07 Eric Neyman , Tim Roughgarden

I study whether and which expert incentives can be provided at what cost when the states of the world become non-contractible, but there is some noisy observation about the states that can be contracted upon. A principal hires an agent to…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-11-12 Zizhe Xia

A contract is an economic tool used by a principal to incentivize one or more agents to exert effort on her behalf, by defining payments based on observable performance measures. A key challenge addressed by contracts -- known in economics…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-12-24 Paul Duetting , Michal Feldman , Inbal Talgam-Cohen

We study the fundamental problem of designing contracts in principal-agent problems under uncertainty. Previous works mostly addressed Bayesian settings in which principal's uncertainty is modeled as a probability distribution over agent's…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-02-22 Martino Bernasconi , Matteo Castiglioni , Alberto Marchesi

We investigate the mechanism design problem faced by a principal who hires \emph{multiple} agents to gather and report costly information. Then, the principal exploits the information to make an informed decision. We model this problem as a…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-07-13 Federico Cacciamani , Matteo Castiglioni , Nicola Gatti

Testing the validity of claims made by self-proclaimed experts can be impossible when testing them in isolation, even with infinite observations at the disposal of the tester. However, in a multiple expert setting it is possible to design a…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2019-12-16 Jorge Barreras , Alvaro Riascos

We study a principal-agent problem with adverse selection, where the principal does not know the agent's true cost but must design a contract to optimize a specific criterion. Unlike standard screening frameworks that allow for…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-05-19 Guillermo Alonso Alvarez , Ibrahim Ekren , Liwei Huang

Learning to defer uncertain predictions to costly experts offers a powerful strategy for improving the accuracy and efficiency of machine learning systems. However, standard training procedures for deferral algorithms typically require…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-31 Giulia DeSalvo , Clara Mohri , Mehryar Mohri , Yutao Zhong

In a real expert system, one may have unreliable, unconfident, conflicting estimates of the value for a particular parameter. It is important for decision making that the information present in this aggregate somehow find its way into use.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-04-15 Henry Hamburger

In the classical principal-agent hidden-action contract model, a principal delegates the execution of a costly task to an agent. In order to complete the task, the agent chooses an action from a set of actions, where each potential action…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-11-27 Tomer Ezra , Stefano Leonardi , Matteo Russo

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

The problem of computing near-optimal contracts in combinatorial settings has recently attracted significant interest in the computer science community. Previous work has provided a rich body of structural and algorithmic insights into this…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-06-26 Michal Feldman , Yoav Gal-Tzur , Tomasz Ponitka , Maya Schlesinger

This paper studies contracting in the presence of externalities with a non-contractible outsider. Multiple equilibria arise from strategic symmetry between the insider agent and the outsider. To address strategic uncertainty, the principal…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-09-09 Hongcheng Li

A central question of crowd-sourcing is how to elicit expertise from agents. This is even more difficult when answers cannot be directly verified. A key challenge is that sophisticated agents may strategically withhold effort or information…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2018-05-24 Yuqing Kong , Grant Schoenebeck

This paper explores the economic interactions within modern crowdsourcing markets. In these markets, employers issue requests for tasks, platforms facilitate the recruitment of crowd workers, and workers complete tasks for monetary rewards.…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Tian Bai , Yiding Feng , Yaohao Liu , Mengfan Ma , Mingyu Xiao

Scoring rules for eliciting expert predictions of random variables are usually developed assuming that experts derive utility only from the quality of their predictions (e.g., score awarded by the rule, or payoff in a prediction market). We…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2011-06-14 Craig Boutilier

A principal hires an agent to acquire soft information about an unknown state. Even though neither how the agent learns nor what the agent discovers are contractible, we show the principal is unconstrained as to what information the agent…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2023-07-31 Mark Whitmeyer , Kun Zhang

A principal contracts with an agent who sequentially searches over projects to generate a prize. The principal initially knows only one of the agent's available projects and evaluates a contract by its worst-case performance. We…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-09-17 Théo Durandard , Udayan Vaidya , Boli Xu

Standard procurement models assume that the buyer knows the quality of the good at the time of procurement; however, in many settings, the quality is learned only long after the transaction. We study procurement problems in which the…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-04-03 Kun Zhang

We study the optimal design of relational contracts that incentivize an expert to share specialized knowledge with a novice. While the expert fears that a more knowledgeable novice may later erode his future rents, a third-party principal…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-01-07 Zhonghong Kuang , Yi Liu , Dong Wei
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