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We study optimal contract design for large populations of heterogeneous agents whose actions generate network spillovers represented by an interaction function. In a linear-quadratic framework, we solve the finite-agent problem and its…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-05-19 Guillermo Alonso Alvarez , Erhan Bayraktar , Ibrahim Ekren

In this paper, we study backward doubly stochastic recursive optimal control problem where the cost function is described by the solution of a backward doubly stochastic differential equation. We give the dynamical programming principle for…

Probability · Mathematics 2020-08-13 Yunhong Li , Anis. Matoussi , Lifeng Wei , Zhen Wu

We consider numerical resolution of principal-agent (PA) problems in continuous time. We formulate a generic PA model with continuous and lump payments and a multi-dimensional strategy of the agent. To tackle the resulting…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2025-12-09 Michael Ludkovski , Changgen Xie , Zimu Zhu

This research considers the ranking and selection with input uncertainty. The objective is to maximize the posterior probability of correctly selecting the best alternative under a fixed simulation budget, where each alternative is measured…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-05-15 Hui Xiao , Zhihong Wei

Crowdsourcing markets have emerged as a popular platform for matching available workers with tasks to complete. The payment for a particular task is typically set by the task's requester, and may be adjusted based on the quality of the…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2015-09-03 Chien-Ju Ho , Aleksandrs Slivkins , Jennifer Wortman Vaughan

The aim of this paper is to address optimality of stochastic control strategies via dynamic programming subject to total variation distance ambiguity on the conditional distribution of the controlled process. We formulate the stochastic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2014-02-06 Ioannis Tzortzis , Charalambos D. Charalambous , Themistoklis Charalambous

In this paper we consider a principal agent problem where the agent is allowed to quit, by incurring a cost. When the current agent quits the job, the principal will hire a new one, possibly with a different type. We characterize the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-09-04 Jianfeng Zhang , Zimu Zhu

We prove the dynamic programming principle (DPP) in a class of problems where an agent controls a $d$-dimensional diffusive dynamics via both classical and singular controls and, moreover, is able to terminate the optimisation at a time of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-11-07 Tiziano De Angelis , Alessandro Milazzo

Recent work [Ran22] formulated a class of optimal control problems involving positive linear systems, linear stage costs, and elementwise constraints on control. It was shown that the problem admits linear optimal cost and the associated…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-09-27 Yuchao Li , Anders Rantzer

This paper considers an optimal impulse control problem of dynamical systems generated by a flow. The performance criteria are total costs over the infinite time horizon. Apart from the main performance to be minimized, there are multiple…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-10-27 Alexey Piunovskiy , Yi Zhang

We study principal-agent problems where a farsighted agent takes costly actions in an MDP. The core challenge in these settings is that agent's actions are hidden to the principal, who can only observe their outcomes, namely state…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-10-18 Matteo Bollini , Francesco Bacchiocchi , Matteo Castiglioni , Alberto Marchesi , Nicola Gatti

This paper is concerned with a finite-horizon inverse control problem, which has the goal of reconstructing, from observations, the possibly non-convex and non-stationary cost driving the actions of an agent. In this context, we present a…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-06-27 Emiland Garrabe , Hozefa Jesawada , Carmen Del Vecchio , Giovanni Russo

In this paper, we study the delayed stochastic recursive optimal control problem with a non-Lipschitz generator, in which both the dynamics of the control system and the recursive cost functional depend on the past path segment of the state…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-12-27 Jiaqiang Wen , Zhen Wu , Qi Zhang

We introduce a generic solver for dynamic portfolio allocation problems when the market exhibits return predictability, price impact and partial observability. We assume that the price modeling can be encoded into a linear state-space and…

Portfolio Management · Quantitative Finance 2016-11-07 M. Abeille , E. Serie , A. Lazaric , X. Brokmann

This paper studies the dynamic programming principle using the measurable selection method for stochastic control of continuous processes. The novelty of this work is to incorporate intermediate expectation constraints on the canonical…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-04-22 Yuk-Loong Chow , Xiang Yu , Chao Zhou

We consider a broad class of dynamic programming (DP) problems that involve a partially linear structure and some positivity properties in their system equation and cost function. We address deterministic and stochastic problems, possibly…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-21 Yuchao Li , Dimitri Bertsekas

We introduce a novel model of contracts with combinatorial actions that accounts for sequential and adaptive agent behavior. As in the standard model, a principal delegates the execution of a costly project to an agent. There are $n$…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-04-22 Tomer Ezra , Michal Feldman , Maya Schlesinger

The existence of optimal contracts of the principal-agent problem is a long-standing problem. According to the general framework in Cvitani\'c et al. [2], this existence can be derived from the existence of a classical solution to a…

Mathematical Finance · Quantitative Finance 2025-03-19 Xinfu Chen , Shuaijie Qian , Guan Qiao

This paper presents a method to approximately solve stochastic optimal control problems in which the cost function and the system dynamics are polynomial. For stochastic systems with polynomial dynamics, the moments of the state can be…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-02-24 Andrew Lamperski , Khem Raj Ghusinga , Abhyudai Singh

The paper studies a distributed constrained optimization problem, where multiple agents connected in a network collectively minimize the sum of individual objective functions subject to a global constraint being an intersection of the local…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2016-03-08 Jinlong Lei , Han-Fu Chen , Hai-Tao Fang