Related papers: The Complexity of Contracts
Can a principal still offer optimal dynamic contracts that are linear in end-of-period outcomes when the agent controls a process that exhibits memory? We provide a positive answer by considering a general Gaussian setting where the output…
This paper explores the capacity of artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to autonomously design incentive-compatible contracts in dual-principal-agent settings, a relatively unexplored aspect of algorithmic mechanism design. We develop a…
A very simple example of an algorithmic problem solvable by dynamic programming is to maximize, over sets A in {1,2,...,n}, the objective function |A| - \sum_i \xi_i 1(i \in A,i+1 \in A) for given \xi_i > 0. This problem, with random…
A large fraction of total healthcare expenditure occurs due to end-of-life (EOL) care, which means it is important to study the problem of more carefully incentivizing necessary versus unnecessary EOL care because this has the potential to…
This paper studies continuous-time optimal contracting in a hierarchy problem which generalises the model of Sung (2015). The hierarchy is modeled by a series of interlinked principal-agent problems, leading to a sequence of Stackelberg…
How to optimally persuade an agent who has a private type? When elicitation is feasible, this amounts to a fairly standard principal-agent-style mechanism design problem, where the persuader employs a mechanism to first elicit the agent's…
We consider Incentive Decision Processes, where a principal seeks to reduce its costs due to another agent's behavior, by offering incentives to the agent for alternate behavior. We focus on the case where a principal interacts with a…
We consider the design of experiments to evaluate treatments that are administered by self-interested agents, each seeking to achieve the highest evaluation and win the experiment. For example, in an advertising experiment, a company wishes…
We consider the problem of scheduling $n$ jobs on $m$ uniform machines while minimizing the makespan ($Q||C_{\max}$) and maximizing the minimum completion time ($Q||C_{\min}$) in an online setting with migration of jobs. In this online…
A principal uses payments conditioned on stochastic outcomes of a team project to elicit costly effort from the team members. We develop a multi-agent generalization of a classic first-order approach to contract optimization by leveraging…
The recent work by Cvitani\'c, Possama\"i, and Touzi (2018) [9] presents a general approach for continuous-time principal-agent problems, through dynamic programming and second-order backward stochastic differential equations (BSDEs). In…
We consider infinite duration alternating move games. These games were previously studied by Roth, Balcan, Kalai and Mansour. They presented an FPTAS for computing an approximated equilibrium, and conjectured that there is a polynomial…
Traditional studies of combinatorial auctions often only consider linear constraints. The rise of smart grid presents a new class of auctions, characterized by quadratic constraints. This paper studies the {\em complex-demand knapsack…
Multi-agent contract design has largely evaluated contracts through the lens of pure Nash equilibria (PNE). This focus, however, is not without loss: In general, the principal can strictly gain by recommending a complex, possibly…
A principal delegates a project to a team $S$ from a pool of $n$ agents. The project's value if all agents in $S$ exert costly effort is $f(S)$. To incentivize the agents to participate, the principal assigns each agent $i\in S$ a share…
We consider AC electrical systems where each electrical device has a power demand expressed as a complex number, and there is a limit on the magnitude of total power supply. Motivated by this scenario, we introduce the complex-demand…
We investigate the possibility of an incentive-compatible (IC, a.k.a. strategy-proof) mechanism for the classification of agents in a network according to their reviews of each other. In the $ \alpha $-classification problem we are…
Integer linear programs of configurations, or configuration IPs, are a classical tool in the design of algorithms for scheduling and packing problems, where a set of items has to be placed in multiple target locations. Herein a…
A principal provides nondiscriminatory incentives for independent and identical agents. The principal cannot observe the agents' actions, nor does she know the entire set of actions available to them. It is shown, very generally, that any…
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…