Related papers: The Complexity of Contracts
We study the fundamental problem of designing contracts in principal-agent problems under uncertainty. Previous works mostly addressed Bayesian settings in which principal's uncertainty is modeled as a probability distribution over agent's…
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…
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…
We consider moral hazard problems where a principal has access to rich monitoring data about an agent's action. Rather than focusing on optimal contracts (which are known to in general be complicated), we characterize the optimal rate at…
We propose a numerical algorithm for computing approximately optimal solutions of the matching for teams problem. Our algorithm is efficient for problems involving large number of agent categories and allows for non-discrete agent type…
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…
We analyze a two-period principal-agent model in which the principal faces a budget constraint, and the agent's private costs of performing tasks across the two periods may be correlated. We examine the optimal design of the reward scheme…
We investigate the mechanism design problem faced by a principal who hires \emph{multiple} agents to gather and report costly information. Then, the principal exploits the information to make an informed decision. We model this problem as a…
The increasing deployment of AI is shaping the future landscape of the internet, which is set to become an integrated ecosystem of AI agents. Orchestrating the interaction among AI agents necessitates decentralized, self-sustaining…
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 hardness of approximation of optimization problems from the point of view of definability. For many NP-hard optimization problems it is known that, unless P = NP, no polynomial-time algorithm can give an approximate solution…
In this paper we study the classical scheduling problem of minimizing the total weighted completion time on a single machine with the constraint that one specific job must be scheduled at a specified position. We give dynamic programs with…
The classic first-order approach (FOA) relaxes the principal-agent problem by replacing the incentive compatibility (IC) constraint with its first-order condition. We show that FOA is not a valid relaxation when the support of the outcome…
Real-world contracts are often ambiguous. While recent work by D\"utting, Feldman, Peretz, and Samuelson (EC 2023, Econometrica 2024) demonstrates that ambiguous contracts can yield large gains for the principal, their optimal solutions…
Contract theory studies how a principal can incentivize agents to exert costly, unobservable effort through performance-based payments. While classical economic models provide elegant characterizations of optimal solutions, modern…
We study the problem of fair rent division that entails splitting the rent and allocating the rooms of an apartment among roommates (agents) in a fair manner. In this setup, a distribution of the rent and an allocation is said to be fair if…
When multiple informative equilibria are possible in a general cheap talk game, how much information can a principal guarantee herself? To answer this question, I define the notion of worst-case implementation-implementation via the worst…
We consider a monopolist seller facing a single buyer with additive valuations over n heterogeneous, independent items. It is known that in this important setting optimal mechanisms may require randomization [HR12], use menus of infinite…
Many real-life contractual relations differ completely from the clean, static model at the heart of principal-agent theory. Typically, they involve repeated strategic interactions of the principal and agent, taking place under uncertainty…
We study techniques to incentivize self-interested agents to form socially desirable solutions in scenarios where they benefit from mutual coordination. Towards this end, we consider coordination games where agents have different intrinsic…