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Related papers: Simple versus Optimal Contracts

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Consider costly and time-consuming tasks that add up to the success of a project, and must be fitted into a given time-frame. This is an instance of the classic budgeted maximization (knapsack) problem, which admits an FPTAS. Now assume an…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-04-10 Ilan Doron-Arad , Hadas Shachnai , Gilad Shmerler , Inbal Talgam-Cohen

We consider an exchange who wishes to set suitable make-take fees to attract liquidity on its platform. Using a principal-agent approach, we are able to describe in quasi-explicit form the optimal contract to propose to a market maker. This…

Trading and Market Microstructure · Quantitative Finance 2019-11-27 Omar El Euch , Thibaut Mastrolia , Mathieu Rosenbaum , Nizar Touzi

We study the principal-agent problem with a third party that we call social planner, whose responsibility is to reconcile the conflicts of interest between the two players and induce socially optimal outcome in terms of some given social…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-11-07 Shiyun Lin , Zhihua Zhang

Ranking is fundamental to many areas, such as search engine optimization, human feedback for language models, as well as peer grading. Crowdsourcing, which is often used for these tasks, requires proper incentivization to ensure accurate…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-01-26 Kiriaki Frangias , Andrew Lin , Ellen Vitercik , Manolis Zampetakis

The main purpose of this paper is to formalize the modelling process, analysis and mathematical definition of corruption when entering into a contract between principal agent and producers. The formulation of the problem and the definition…

Economics · Quantitative Finance 2018-04-25 Oleg Malafeyev , Olga Koroleva , Dmitriy Prusskiy , Olga Zenovich

We consider a moral hazard problem with multiple principals in a continuous-time model. The agent can only work exclusively for one principal at a given time, so faces an optimal switching problem. Using a randomized formulation, we manage…

Probability · Mathematics 2022-09-14 Kaitong Hu , Zhenjie Ren , Junjian Yang

In this paper, we consider a general distributed system with multiple agents who select and then implement actions in the system. The system has an operator with a centralized objective. The agents, on the other hand, are selfinterested and…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2020-01-15 Donya Ghavidel , Pratyush Chakraborty , Enrique Baeyens , Vijay Gupta , Pramod P. Khargonekar

Optimal mechanism design enjoys a beautiful and well-developed theory, and also a number of killer applications. Rules of thumb produced by the field influence everything from how governments sell wireless spectrum licenses to how the major…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2014-09-23 Tim Roughgarden

Negotiation is a very common interaction between automated agents. Many common negotiation protocols work with cardinal utilities, even though ordinal preferences, which only rank the outcomes, are easier to elicit from humans. In this work…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-12-18 Sefi Erlich , Noam Hazon , Sarit Kraus

The agency problem emerges in today's large scale machine learning tasks, where the learners are unable to direct content creation or enforce data collection. In this work, we propose a theoretical framework for aligning economic interests…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-07-03 Jibang Wu , Siyu Chen , Mengdi Wang , Huazheng Wang , Haifeng Xu

We study the mechanism design problem of selling a public good to a group of agents by a principal in the correlated private value environment. We assume the principal only knows the expectations of the agents' values, but does not know the…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2022-01-06 Wanchang Zhang

This paper examines the optimal contracts in a two-dimensional screening model where one dimension(group identity) is verifiable by agents but not falsifiable. A principal offers contracts to agents who differ in cost types and group…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-04-02 Charles Po-Cheng Huang

Dynamic contracts with multiple agents is a classical decentralized decision-making problem with asymmetric information. In this paper, we extend the single-agent dynamic incentive contract model in continuous-time to a multi-agent scheme…

Econometrics · Economics 2017-10-10 Qi Luo , Romesh Saigal

We study a general contracting problem between the principal and a finite set of competitive agents, who perform equivalent changes of measure by controlling the drift of the output process and the compensator of its associated jump…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-08-25 Nicolás Hernández Santibáñez

Two firms are engaged in a competitive prediction task. Each firm has two sources of data -- labeled historical data and unlabeled inference-time data -- and uses the former to derive a prediction model, and the latter to make predictions…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2024-03-27 Yotam Gafni , Ronen Gradwohl , Moshe Tennenholtz

We study the power of menus of contracts in principal-agent problems with adverse selection (agents can be one of several types) and moral hazard (we cannot observe agent actions directly). For principal-agent problems with $T$ types and…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-06-23 Guru Guruganesh , Jon Schneider , Joshua Wang , Junyao Zhao

We study the design of optimal incentives in sequential processes. To do so, we consider a basic and fundamental model in which an agent initiates a value-creating sequential process through costly investment with random success. If…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2023-11-22 Jens Gudmundsson , Jens Leth Hougaard , Juan D. Moreno-Ternero , Lars Peter Østerdal

In this article, we employ a principal-agent model to analyze optimal contract design in a monopolistic reinsurance market under adverse selection with a continuum of insurer types. Instead of using the classical expected utility framework,…

Risk Management · Quantitative Finance 2026-01-06 Ka Chun Cheung , Sheung Chi Phillip Yam , Fei Lung Yuen , Yiying Zhang

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…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2013-08-19 Kevin Waugh , Brian D. Ziebart , J. Andrew Bagnell

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