Related papers: Robust Contracting in General Contract Spaces

Strategy-proof mechanisms are widely used in market design. In an abstract allocation framework where outside options are available to agents, we obtain two results for strategy-proof mechanisms. They provide a unified foundation for…

Contract theory typically assumes full commitment by the principal, but many contracts fix some payoff-relevant decisions while leaving others discretionary. We ask when imperfect commitment is equivalent to full commitment. For contracts…

Liberalized electricity markets often include resource adequacy mechanisms that require consumers to contract with generation resources well in advance of real-time operations. While administratively defined mechanisms have most commonly…

We study a multi-agent contracting problem where agents exert costly effort to achieve individually observable binary outcomes. While the principal can theoretically extract the full social welfare using a discriminatory contract that…

We study the design of information acquisition games-environments where a designer contracts their action on Sender's choice of experiment and the realized signals about some state-and identify which predictions can be made absent knowledge…

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…

We consider a hidden-action principal-agent model, in which actions require different amounts of effort, and the agent privately knows his ability that determines his cost of effort. We show that linear contracts admit approximation…

We study principal-agent problems in which a principal commits to an outcome-dependent payment scheme -- called contract -- in order to induce an agent to take a costly, unobservable action leading to favorable outcomes. We consider a…

There is only one technique for prior-free optimal mechanism design that generalizes beyond the structurally benevolent setting of digital goods. This technique uses random sampling to estimate the distribution of agent values and then…

The paper develops a decentralized resource allocation mechanism for allocating divisible goods with capacity constraints to non-price-taking agents with general concave utilities. The proposed mechanism is always budget balanced,…

This paper investigates a distributed optimization problem under edge agreements, where each agent in the network is also subject to local convex constraints. Generalized from the concept of consensus, a group of edge agreements represents…

We consider a seller who offers services to a buyer with multi-unit demand. Prior to the realization of demand, the buyer receives a noisy signal of their future demand, and the seller can design contracts based on the reported value of…

We study the design of optimal allocation mechanisms in an environment where agents and goods arrive stochastically. Agents have private types that determine the principal payoff. Either agents or goods can be held in a queue at a flow cost…

Designing large-scale control systems to satisfy complex specifications is hard in practice, as most formal methods are limited to systems of modest size. Contract theory has been proposed as a modular alternative to formal methods in…

We investigate approximately optimal mechanisms in settings where bidders' utility functions are non-linear; specifically, convex, with respect to payments (such settings arise, for instance, in procurement auctions for energy). We provide…

This paper fully studies distributed optimal consensus problem in non-directed dynamical networks. We consider a group of networked agents that are supposed to rendezvous at the optimal point of a collective convex objective function. Each…

This paper studies a robust utility maximization problem for intractable claims under distributional ambiguity, where the distribution of the claim cannot be inferred from market information and its dependence with tradable assets is…

Algorithmic contract design studies scenarios where a principal incentivizes an agent to exert effort on her behalf. In this work, we focus on settings where the agent's type is drawn from an unknown distribution, and formalize an offline…

We investigate the probabilistic feasibility of randomized solutions to two distinct classes of uncertain multi-agent optimization programs. We first assume that only the constraints of the program are affected by uncertainty, while the…

Robust and distributionally robust optimization are modeling paradigms for decision-making under uncertainty where the uncertain parameters are only known to reside in an uncertainty set or are governed by any probability distribution from…