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In principal-agent models, a principal offers a contract to an agent to perform a certain task. The agent exerts a level of effort that maximizes her utility. The principal is oblivious to the agent's chosen level of effort, and conditions…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-07-14 Alon Cohen , Moran Koren , Argyrios Deligkas

How should a buyer design procurement mechanisms when suppliers' costs are unknown, and the buyer does not have a prior belief? We demonstrate that simple mechanisms - that share a constant fraction of the buyer utility with the seller -…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-12-11 Dirk Bergemann , Tibor Heumann , Stephen Morris

An expert classification system having statistical information about the prior probabilities of the different classes should be able to use this knowledge to reduce the amount of additional information that it must collect, e.g., through…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2013-03-25 Yuping Qiu , Louis Anthony Cox, , Lawrence Davis

We study the optimal design of electricity contracts among a population of consumers with different needs. This question is tackled within the framework of Principal-Agent problems in presence of adverse selection. The particular features…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-09-17 Clémence Alasseur , Ivar Ekeland , Romuald Elie , Nicolás Hernández Santibáñez , Dylan Possamaï

We study hidden-action principal-agent problems in which a principal commits to an outcome-dependent payment scheme (called contract) so as to incentivize the agent to take a costly, unobservable action leading to favorable outcomes. In…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-08-18 Matteo Castiglioni , Alberto Marchesi , Nicola Gatti

We consider settings where an uninformed principal must hear arguments from two better-informed agents, corresponding to two possible courses of action that they argue for. The arguments are verifiable in the sense that the true state of…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-12-01 Alexander Heckett , Vincent Conitzer

We consider the classic principal-agent model of contract theory, in which a principal designs an outcome-dependent compensation scheme to incentivize an agent to take a costly and unobservable action. When all of the model…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2020-08-11 Paul Dütting , Tim Roughgarden , Inbal Talgam-Cohen

In the classical principal-agent problem, a principal must design a contract to incentivize an agent to perform an action on behalf of the principal. We study the classical principal-agent problem in a setting where the agent can be of one…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2020-10-15 Guru Guruganesh , Jon Schneider , Joshua Wang

We study the role of regulatory inspections in a contract design problem in which a principal interacts separately with multiple agents. Each agent's hidden action includes a dimension that determines whether they undertake an extra costly…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-11-07 Alireza Fallah , Michael I. Jordan

We introduce a new model of combinatorial contracts in which a principal delegates the execution of a costly task to an agent. To complete the task, the agent can take any subset of a given set of unobservable actions, each of which has an…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Paul Duetting , Tomer Ezra , Michal Feldman , Thomas Kesselheim

We study statistical parameter estimation in the setting of data markets. A buyer seeks to estimate a parameter based on samples that can be purchased from competing providers that differ in their data quality and provision costs. When…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-04-13 Yuchen Hu , Martin J. Wainwright , Stephen Bates

Ranking is fundamental to many areas, such as search engine optimization, human feedback for language models, as well as peer grading. Crowdsourcing, which is often used for these tasks, requires proper incentivization to ensure accurate…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-01-26 Kiriaki Frangias , Andrew Lin , Ellen Vitercik , Manolis Zampetakis

Contract scheduling is a general technique that allows to design a system with interruptible capabilities, given an algorithm that is not necessarily interruptible. Previous work on this topic has largely assumed that the interruption is a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-11-26 Spyros Angelopoulos , Shahin Kamali

We study a bilateral trade problem where a principal has private information that is revealed with delay, such as a seller who does not yet know her production cost. Postponing the contracting process incurs a costly delay, while early…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2024-08-05 Francesco Giovannoni , Toomas Hinnosaar

We study principal-agent problems in which a principal commits to an outcome-dependent payment scheme -- called contract -- in order to induce an agent to take a costly, unobservable action leading to favorable outcomes. We consider a…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-06-10 Francesco Bacchiocchi , Matteo Castiglioni , Alberto Marchesi , Nicola Gatti

We study the mechanism design problem of selling a public good to a group of agents by a principal in the correlated private value environment. We assume the principal only knows the expectations of the agents' values, but does not know the…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2022-01-06 Wanchang Zhang

This paper considers the hidden-action model of the principal-agent problem, in which a principal incentivizes an agent to work on a project using a contract. We investigate whether contracts with bounded payments are learnable and…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-02-23 Yurong Chen , Zhaohua Chen , Xiaotie Deng , Zhiyi Huang

When eliciting forecasts from a group of experts, it is important to reward predictions so that market participants are incentivized to tell the truth. Existing mechanisms partially accomplish this but remain susceptible to groups of…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2024-11-26 Jack Edwards

We consider the problem of eliciting expert assessments of an uncertain parameter. The context is risk control, where there are, in fact, three uncertain parameters to be estimates. Two of these are probabilities, requiring the that the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2020-10-23 Paul B. Kantor

How do consultants price expertise? This paper studies a problem of selling information products (expertise) to a buyer (client) who faces decision-making problem under uncertainty. The client is privately informed about the type of…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2024-05-21 Klajdi Hoxha