Related papers: Robust Contracting in General Contract Spaces
This paper presents a novel distributed robust optimization scheme for steering distributions of multi-agent systems under stochastic and deterministic uncertainty. Robust optimization is a subfield of optimization which aims to discover an…
A principal contracts with an agent who sequentially searches over projects to generate a prize. The principal initially knows only one of the agent's available projects and evaluates a contract by its worst-case performance. We…
Optimal mechanisms have been provided in quite general multi-item settings, as long as each bidder's type distribution is given explicitly by listing every type in the support along with its associated probability. In the implicit setting,…
Motivated by the emergence of decentralized machine learning (ML) ecosystems, we study the delegation of data collection. Taking the field of contract theory as our starting point, we design optimal and near-optimal contracts that deal with…
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…
We consider optimal mechanism design for the case with one buyer and two items. The buyer's valuations towards the two items are independent and additive. In this setting, optimal mechanism is unknown for general valuation distributions. We…
A quota mechanism, such as a mandatory grading curve, links together multiple decisions. We analyze the performance of quota mechanisms when the number of linked decisions is finite and the designer has imperfect knowledge of the type…
We introduce a new model of combinatorial contracts in which a principal delegates the execution of a costly task to an agent. To complete the task, the agent can take any subset of a given set of unobservable actions, each of which has an…
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,…
This paper studies contracting in the presence of externalities with a non-contractible outsider. Multiple equilibria arise from strategic symmetry between the insider agent and the outsider. To address strategic uncertainty, the principal…
In this paper, we construct a solution to the optimal contract problem for delegated portfolio management of the fist-best (risk-sharing) type. The novelty of our result is (i) in the robustness of the optimal contract with respect to…
What type of delegation contract should be offered when facing a risk of the magnitude of the pandemic we are currently experiencing and how does the likelihood of an exogenous early termination of the relationship modify the terms of a…
Robust mechanism design is a rising alternative to Bayesian mechanism design, which yields designs that do not rely on assumptions like full distributional knowledge. We apply this approach to mechanisms for selling a single item, assuming…
Generalized from the concept of consensus, this paper considers a group of edge agreements, i.e. constraints defined for neighboring agents, in which each pair of neighboring agents is required to satisfy one edge agreement constraint. Edge…
The problem of computing near-optimal contracts in combinatorial settings has recently attracted significant interest in the computer science community. Previous work has provided a rich body of structural and algorithmic insights into this…
In a continuous-time setting where a risk-averse agent controls the drift of an output process driven by a Brownian motion, optimal contracts are linear in the terminal output; this result is well-known in a setting with moral hazard and…
We study a robust selling problem where a seller attempts to sell one item to a buyer but is uncertain about the buyer's valuation distribution. Existing literature shows that robust screening provides a stronger theoretical guarantee than…
We provide a unifying framework for distributed convex optimization over time-varying networks, in the presence of constraints and uncertainty, features that are typically treated separately in the literature. We adopt a proximal…
We propose a refinement of the maxmin approach to robustness. A mechanism's payoff guarantee over an ambiguity set is \emph{robust} if the guarantee is approximately satisfied at priors near the ambiguity set (in the weak topology). We show…
Modern engineering systems include many components of different types and functions. Verifying that these systems satisfy given specifications can be an arduous task, as most formal verification methods are limited to systems of moderate…