Related papers: Dynamic optimal contract under parameter uncertain…
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…
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).…
This paper studies continuous-time optimal contracting in a hierarchy problem which generalises the model of Sung (2015). The hierarchy is modeled by a series of interlinked principal-agent problems, leading to a sequence of Stackelberg…
We study an optimal reinsurance problem under a diffusion risk model for an insurer who aims to minimize the probability of lifetime ruin. To rule out moral hazard issues, we only consider moral-hazard-free reinsurance contracts by imposing…
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…
I provide a sufficient condition under which a principal does not benefit from committing to a mechanism in economic models represented by a maximisation problem under constraints. These problems include mechanism design, principal-agent…
We study a bilevel \emph{max-max} optimization framework for principal-agent contract design, in which a principal chooses incentives to maximize utility while anticipating the agent's best response. This problem, central to moral hazard…
We propose a distributionally robust principal agent formulation, which generalizes some common variants of worst-case and Bayesian principal agent problems. We construct a theoretical framework to certify whether any surjective contract…
We introduce an infinite-horizon, continuous-time portfolio selection problem faced by an agent with periodic S-shaped preference and present bias. The inclusion of a quasi-hyperbolic discount function leads to time-inconsistency and we…
An agent-based model for firms' dynamics is developed. The model consists of firm agents with identical characteristic parameters and a bank agent. Dynamics of those agents is described by their balance sheets. Each firm tries to maximize…
Linear contracts are ubiquitous in practice, yet optimal contract theory often prescribes complex, nonlinear structures. We provide a distributional robustness justification for linear contracts. We study a principal-agent problem where the…
This paper studies how uncertainty about problem difficulty shapes problem-solving strategies. I develop a dynamic model where an agent solves a problem by brainstorming approaches of unknown quality and allocating a fixed effort budget…
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 work considers a repeated principal-agent bandit game, where the principal can only interact with her environment through the agent. The principal and the agent have misaligned objectives and the choice of action is only left to the…
This paper studies optimal Public Private Partnerships contract between a public entity and a consortium, in continuous-time and with a continuous payment, with the possibility for the public to stop the contract. The public ("she") pays a…
We propose a new principal-agent framework where a principal communicates a roadmap -- a set of plausible outcome models and a prior belief over them -- to guide an agent who is learning the value of innovation. The agent trusts the prior…
In the classical principal-agent hidden-action contract model, a principal delegates the execution of a costly task to an agent. In order to complete the task, the agent chooses an action from a set of actions, where each potential action…
In this paper, we address three Principal--Agent problems in a moral hazard context and show that they are connected. We start by studying the problem of Principal with multiple Agents in cooperation. The term cooperation is manifested here…
We study hidden-action principal-agent problems in which a principal commits to an outcome-dependent payment scheme (called contract) so as to incentivize the agent to take a costly, unobservable action leading to favorable outcomes. In…
I revisit the standard moral-hazard model, in which an agent's preference over contracts is rooted in costly effort choice. I characterise the behavioural content of the model in terms of empirically testable axioms, and show that the…