Related papers: Contracting Experts With Unknown Cost Structures
We study a principal-agent team production model. The principal hires a team of agents to participate in a common production task. The exact effort of each agent is unobservable and unverifiable, but the total production outcome (e.g. the…
In this paper we introduce the hiring under uncertainty problem to model the questions faced by hiring committees in large enterprises and universities alike. Given a set of $n$ eligible candidates, the decision maker needs to choose the…
A principal contracts with an agent through an informed delegate. Although the principal cannot directly mediate the interaction, she can restrict the menus of contracts the delegate may offer. We characterize the outcomes implementable…
We outline how to create a mechanism that provides an optimal way to elicit, from an arbitrary group of experts, the probability of the truth of an arbitrary logical proposition together with collective information that has an explicit form…
We study the classic principal-agent model when the signal observed by the principal is chosen by the agent. We fully characterize the optimal information structure from an agent's perspective in a general moral hazard setting with limited…
This paper studies the problem of procuring diverse resources in a forward market to cover a set $\bf{E}$ of uncertain demand signals $\bf{e}$. We consider two scenarios: (a) $\bf{e}$ is revealed all at once by an oracle (b) $\bf{e}$…
Prediction markets provide an efficient means to assess uncertain quantities from forecasters. Traditional and competitive strictly proper scoring rules have been shown to incentivize players to provide truthful probabilistic forecasts.…
We consider the robust contract design problem when the principal only has limited information about the actions the agent can take. The principal evaluates a contract according to its worst-case performance caused by the uncertain action…
We study how to allocate resources to participants who can strategically misrepresent their deservingness at a cost. A principal assigns item(s) (or money) among multiple agents on the basis of their costly signals. Each agent's signal…
We consider a principal-agent problem where the agent may privately choose to acquire relevant information prior to taking a hidden action. This model generalizes two special cases: a classic moral hazard setting, and a more recently…
In this work we study the problem of inferring a discrete probability distribution using both expert knowledge and empirical data. This is an important issue for many applications where the scarcity of data prevents a purely empirical…
A platform commits to a search algorithm that maps prices to search order. Given this algorithm, sellers set prices, and consumers engage in sequential search. This framework generalizes the ordered search literature. We introduce a special…
We study procurement design when the buyer is uncertain about both the value of the good and the seller's cost. The buyer has a conjectured model but does not fully trust it. She first identifies mechanisms that maximize her worst-case…
We study the design of contracts that incentivize a researcher to conduct a costly experiment, extending the work of Yoder (2022) from binary states to a general state space. The cost is private information of the researcher. When the…
In many settings -- like market research and social choice -- people may be presented with unfamiliar options. Classical mechanisms may perform poorly because they fail to incentivize people to learn about these options, or worse, encourage…
We consider a dynamic moral hazard problem between a principal and an agent, where the sole instrument the principal has to incentivize the agent is the disclosure of information. The principal aims at maximizing the (discounted) number of…
We study a natural application of contract design in the context of sequential exploration problems. In our principal-agent setting, a search task is delegated to an agent. The agent performs a sequential exploration of $n$ boxes, suffers…
We consider a seller who offers services to a buyer with multi-unit demand. Prior to the realization of demand, the buyer receives a noisy signal of their future demand, and the seller can design contracts based on the reported value of…
Consider a principal who wants to search through a space of stochastic solutions for one maximizing their utility. If the principal cannot conduct this search on their own, they may instead delegate this problem to an agent with distinct…
We study buyer-optimal procurement mechanisms when quality is contractible. When some costs are borne by every participant of a procurement auction regardless of winning, the classic analysis should be amended. We show that an optimal…