Related papers: Contract theory in a VUCA world

Real-world contracts are often ambiguous. While recent work by D\"utting, Feldman, Peretz, and Samuelson (EC 2023, Econometrica 2024) demonstrates that ambiguous contracts can yield large gains for the principal, their optimal solutions…

Machine learning has become increasingly popular in informing data-driven policy-making. Policies influence behavior in individuals or populations, and ideally, through observational signals, policy-makers learn which policies are…

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…

We study the hidden-action principal-agent problem in an online setting. In each round, the principal posts a contract that specifies the payment to the agent based on each outcome. The agent then makes a strategic choice of action that…

We examine the trade-off between the provision of incentives to exert costly effort (ex-ante moral hazard) and the incentives needed to prevent the agent from manipulating the profit observed by the principal (ex-post moral hazard).…

We introduce a novel extension to robust control theory that explicitly addresses uncertainty in the value function's gradient, a form of uncertainty endemic to applications like reinforcement learning where value functions are…

We study a stochastic control problem on a bounded domain, which arises from a continuous-time optimal management model. Via the corresponding Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation the value function is shown to be jointly continuous and to…

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…

Modeling the purposeful behavior of imperfect agents from a small number of observations is a challenging task. When restricted to the single-agent decision-theoretic setting, inverse optimal control techniques assume that observed behavior…

The increasing deployment of AI is shaping the future landscape of the internet, which is set to become an integrated ecosystem of AI agents. Orchestrating the interaction among AI agents necessitates decentralized, self-sustaining…

In this paper we study the optimization problem of an economic agent who chooses a job and the time of retirement as well as consumption and portfolio of assets. The agent is constrained in the ability to borrow against future income. We…

A principal provides nondiscriminatory incentives for independent and identical agents. The principal cannot observe the agents' actions, nor does she know the entire set of actions available to them. It is shown, very generally, that any…

In this paper, we extend the optimal securitisation model of Pag\`es [50] and Possama\"i and Pag\`es [51] between an investor and a bank to a setting allowing both moral hazard and adverse selection. Following the recent approach to these…

We study a natural combinatorial single-principal multi-agent contract design problem, in which a principal motivates a team of agents to exert effort toward a given task. At the heart of our model is a reward function, which maps the agent…

This paper focuses on the optimal control of a class of stochastic Volterra integral equations. Here the coefficients are regular and not assumed to be of convolution type. We show that, under mild regularity assumptions, these equations…

This paper investigates a Pareto optimal insurance problem, where the insured maximizes her rank-dependent utility preference and the insurer is risk neutral and employs the mean-variance premium principle. To eliminate potential moral…

Adding a capacity constraint to a hidden-action principal-agent problem results in the same set of Pareto optimal contracts as the unconstrained problem where output is scaled down by a constant factor. This scaling factor is increasing in…

We present a continuous-time contract whereby a top-level player can incentivize a hierarchy of players below him to act in his best interest despite only observing the output of his direct subordinate. This paper extends Sannikov's…

We apply the stochastic Perron method of Bayraktar and S\^irbu to a general infinite horizon optimal control problem, where the state $X$ is a controlled diffusion process, and the state constraint is described by a closed set. We prove…

We introduce a stochastic version of the optimal transport problem. We provide an analysis by means of the study of the associated Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation, which is set on the set of probability measures. We introduce a new…