Related papers: Robust Contracting in General Contract Spaces
We study a robust contract design problem with deferred inspection, in which a principal allocates a scarce resource to an agent, observes the agent's realized outcome ex post at negligible cost, and conditions transfers on this information…
We consider the robust contract design problem when the principal only has limited information about the actions the agent can take. The principal evaluates a contract according to its worst-case performance caused by the uncertain action…
A principal contracts with an agent through an informed delegate. Although the principal cannot directly mediate the interaction, she can restrict the menus of contracts the delegate may offer. We characterize the outcomes implementable…
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…
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…
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…
Robot allocation plays an essential role in facilitating robotic service provision across various domains. Yet the increasing number of users and the uncertainties regarding the users' true service requirements have posed challenges for the…
We explore the deliberate infusion of ambiguity into the design of contracts. We show that when the agent is ambiguity-averse and hence chooses an action that maximizes their minimum utility, the principal can strictly gain from using an…
Contract scheduling is a widely studied framework for designing real-time systems with interruptible capabilities. Previous work has showed that a prediction on the interruption time can help improve the performance of contract-based…
In classical contract theory, we usually impose two assumptions: delegated contracts and perfect commitment. While the second assumption is demanding, the first one suffers no loss of generality. Following this tradition, current…
Conditional risk minimization arises in high-stakes decisions where risk must be assessed in light of side information, such as stressed economic conditions, specific customer profiles, or other contextual covariates. Constructing reliable…
In this paper, we initiate the computational problem of jointly designing information and contracts. We consider three possible classes of contracts with decreasing flexibility and increasing simplicity: ambiguous contracts, menus of…
Robust optimization methods have shown practical advantages in a wide range of decision-making applications under uncertainty. Recently, their efficacy has been extended to multi-period settings. Current approaches model uncertainty either…
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…
A novel distributed algorithm is proposed for finite-time converging to a feasible consensus solution satisfying global optimality to a certain accuracy of the distributed robust convex optimization problem (DRCO) subject to bounded…
We consider the optimal reinsurance problem from the point of view of a direct insurer owning several dependent risks, assuming a maximal expected utility criterion and independent negotiation of reinsurance for each risk. Without any…
We study how governments promote social welfare through the design of contracting environments. We model the regulation of contracting as default delegation: the government chooses a delegation set of contract terms it is willing to…
We study mechanism design with predictions for the obnoxious facility location problem. We present deterministic strategyproof mechanisms that display tradeoffs between robustness and consistency on segments, squares, circles and trees. All…
We study the problem of designing optimal auctions under restrictions on the set of permissible allocations. In addition to allowing us to restrict to deterministic mechanisms, we can also indirectly model non-additive valuations. We prove…
We study a seller who sells a single good to multiple bidders with uncertainty over the joint distribution of bidders' valuations, as well as bidders' higher-order beliefs about their opponents. The seller only knows the (possibly…