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Adjustable autonomy refers to entities dynamically varying their own autonomy, transferring decision-making control to other entities (typically agents transferring control to human users) in key situations. Determining whether and when…

We study a general class of Principal-Agent problems in continuous time under hidden action. By formulating the model as a coupled stochastic optimal control problem we are able to find a set of necessary conditions characterizing optimal…

An agent acquires a costly flexible signal before making a decision. We explore to what degree knowledge of the agent's information costs helps predict her behavior. We establish an impossibility result: learning costs alone generate no…

We consider the problem of designing a sequential decision making agent to maximize an unknown time-varying function which switches with time. At each step, the agent receives an observation of the function's value at a point decided by the…

Principal-agent problems arise when one party acts on behalf of another, leading to conflicts of interest. The economic literature has extensively studied principal-agent problems, and recent work has extended this to more complex scenarios…

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…

A principal who values an object allocates it to one or more agents. Agents learn private information (signals) from an information designer about the allocation payoff to the principal. Monetary transfer is not available but the principal…

In many multi-player interactions, players incur strictly positive costs each time they execute actions e.g. 'menu costs' or transaction costs in financial systems. Since acting at each available opportunity would accumulate prohibitively…

We introduce a class of robust control problems formulated in min-max form, in which the principal agent is viewed as a central planner facing Nature. The agent's cost is a nonlinear function of all its possible realizations, encompassing…

This paper studies how to maximize a spectrum database operator's expected revenue in sharing spectrum to secondary users, through joint pricing and admission control of spectrum resources. A unique feature of our model is the consideration…

We consider the problem of estimating the possibly non-convex cost of an agent by observing its interactions with a nonlinear, non-stationary and stochastic environment. For this inverse problem, we give a result that allows to estimate the…

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…

We study sequences, parametrized by the number of agents, of many agent exit time stochastic control problems with risk-sensitive cost structure. We identify a fully characterizing assumption, under which each of such control problem…

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…

We develop a continuous-time principal-agent model of gig work, where contractual flexibility allows the employer to adjust fixed pay and output-based incentives dynamically. The worker's participation depends on a backward-looking…

We develop a model of the behaviour of a dynamically optimizing economic agent who makes consumption-saving and spatial relocation decisions. We formulate an existence result for the model, derive the necessary conditions for optimality and…

This paper studies a type of consumption preference where some adjustment costs are incured whenever the past spending maximum and the past spending minimum records are updated. This preference can capture the adverse effects of the…

We introduce a dynamic mechanism design problem in which the designer wants to offer for sale an item to an agent, and another item to the same agent at some point in the future. The agent's joint distribution of valuations for the two…

We study the problem of a principal who wants to influence an agent's observable action, subject to an ex-post budget. The agent has a private type determining their cost function. This paper endogenizes the value of the resource driving…

We study Bayesian automated mechanism design in unstructured dynamic environments, where a principal repeatedly interacts with an agent, and takes actions based on the strategic agent's report of the current state of the world. Both the…