Related papers: Contracting Experts With Unknown Cost Structures

We explore the deliberate infusion of ambiguity into the design of contracts. We show that when the agent is ambiguity-averse and hence chooses an action that maximizes their minimum utility, the principal can strictly gain from using an…

Following the recent literature on make take fees policies, we consider an exchange wishing to set a suitable contract with several market makers in order to improve trading quality on its platform. To do so, we use a principal-agent…

We revisit the well-studied problem of budget-feasible procurement, where a buyer with a strict budget constraint seeks to acquire services from a group of strategic providers (the sellers). During the last decade, several strategyproof…

We analyze a principal-agent procurement problem in which the principal (she) is unaware some of the marginal cost types of the agent (he). Communication arises naturally as some types of the agent may have an incentive to raise the…

In many first-price auctions, bidders face considerable strategic uncertainty: They cannot perfectly anticipate the other bidders' bidding behavior. We propose a model in which bidders do not know the entire distribution of opponent bids…

We study the incentivized information acquisition problem, where a principal hires an agent to gather information on her behalf. Such a problem is modeled as a Stackelberg game between the principal and the agent, where the principal…

A central problem in business concerns the optimal allocation of limited resources to a set of available tasks, where the payoff of these tasks is inherently uncertain. In credit card fraud detection, for instance, a bank can only assign a…

The prevalence and importance of algorithmic two-sided marketplaces has drawn attention to the issue of fairness in such settings. Algorithmic decisions are used in assigning students to schools, users to advertisers, and applicants to job…

We study a single task allocation problem where each worker connects to some other workers to form a network and the task requester only connects to some of the workers. The goal is to design an allocation mechanism such that each worker is…

We study a new class of contract design problems where a principal delegates the execution of multiple projects to a set of agents. The principal's expected reward from each project is a combinatorial function of the agents working on it.…

We suggest that the analysis of incomplete contracting developed by law and economics researchers can provide a useful framework for understanding the AI alignment problem and help to generate a systematic approach to finding solutions. We…

Many-to-many matching with contracts is studied in the framework of revealed preferences. All preferences are described by choice functions that satisfy natural conditions. Under a no-externality assumption individual preferences can be…

A principal and an agent face symmetric uncertainty about the value of two correlated projects for the agent. The principal chooses which project values to publicly discover and makes a proposal to the agent, who accepts if and only if the…

This paper tackles challenges in pricing and revenue projections due to consumer uncertainty. We propose a novel data-based approach for firms facing unknown consumer type distributions. Unlike existing methods, we assume firms only observe…

This work proposes a way to align statistical modeling with decision making. We provide a method that propagates the uncertainty in predictive modeling to the uncertainty in operational cost, where operational cost is the amount spent by…

Algorithmic contract design studies scenarios where a principal incentivizes an agent to exert effort on her behalf. In this work, we focus on settings where the agent's type is drawn from an unknown distribution, and formalize an offline…

We consider the problem of budget feasible mechanism design proposed by Singer (2010), but in a Bayesian setting. A principal has a public value for hiring a subset of the agents and a budget, while the agents have private costs for being…

We study principal-agent problems in which a principal commits to an outcome-dependent payment scheme (a.k.a. contract) so as to induce an agent to take a costly, unobservable action. We relax the assumption that the principal perfectly…

Experts advising decision-makers are likely to display expertise which varies as a function of the problem instance. In practice, this may lead to sub-optimal or discriminatory decisions against minority cases. In this work we model such…

Motivating careerists is challenging for political organizations. Without explicit contracts, careerists often pander to public opinions or their superiors' preferences. Worse, when tasked with implementing these distorted decisions, they…