Related papers: Contracting over persistent information
The hidden-action model captures a fundamental problem of principal-agent theory and provides an optimal sharing rule when only the outcome but not the effort can be observed. However, the hidden-action model builds on various explicit and…
We study a bilateral trade problem where a principal has private information that is revealed with delay, such as a seller who does not yet know her production cost. Postponing the contracting process incurs a costly delay, while early…
We study a principal-agent team production model. The principal hires a team of agents to participate in a common production task. The exact effort of each agent is unobservable and unverifiable, but the total production outcome (e.g. the…
We consider a principal agent project selection problem with asymmetric information. There are $N$ projects and the principal must select exactly one of them. Each project provides some profit to the principal and some payoff to the agent…
We study a screening problem in which an agent privately observes a set of feasible technologies and can strategically disclose only a subset to the principal. The principal then takes an action whose payoff consequences for both players…
This paper studies the provision of incentives for information acquisition. Information is costly for an agent to acquire and unobservable to a principal. We show that any Pareto optimal contract has a decomposition into a fraction of…
We examine the trade-off between the provision of incentives to exert costly effort (ex-ante moral hazard) and the incentives needed to prevent the agent from manipulating the profit observed by the principal (ex-post moral hazard).…
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 show that in delegation problems, a principal benefits from belief misalignment vis-\`a-vis an agent when the latter can flexibly acquire costly information. The agent optimally succumbs to confirmatory learning, leading him to favor the…
This work considers a repeated principal-agent bandit game, where the principal can only interact with her environment through the agent. The principal and the agent have misaligned objectives and the choice of action is only left to the…
We consider a principal-agent problem where the agent may privately choose to acquire relevant information prior to taking a hidden action. This model generalizes two special cases: a classic moral hazard setting, and a more recently…
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 study principal-agent problems where a farsighted agent takes costly actions in an MDP. The core challenge in these settings is that agent's actions are hidden to the principal, who can only observe their outcomes, namely state…
We study the algorithmic problem faced by an information holder (seller) who wants to optimally sell such information to a budged-constrained decision maker (buyer) that has to undertake some action. Differently from previous, we consider…
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…
I study whether and which expert incentives can be provided at what cost when the states of the world become non-contractible, but there is some noisy observation about the states that can be contracted upon. A principal hires an agent to…
We present a continuous-time contract whereby a top-level player can incentivize a hierarchy of players below him to act in his best interest despite only observing the output of his direct subordinate. This paper extends Sannikov's…
We consider a moral hazard problem with multiple principals in a continuous-time model. The agent can only work exclusively for one principal at a given time, so faces an optimal switching problem. Using a randomized formulation, we manage…
We consider settings where an uninformed principal must hear arguments from two better-informed agents, corresponding to two possible courses of action that they argue for. The arguments are verifiable in the sense that the true state of…
We study a variant of the principal-agent problem in which the principal does not directly observe the agent's effort outcome; rather, she gets a signal about the agent's action according to a variable information structure designed by a…