Related papers: Screening for breakthroughs
Arthur [1,2] provided a model to explain the circumstances that lead to technological lock-in into a specific trajectory. We contribute substantially to this area of research by investigating the circumstances under which technological…
Preliminary evidence on the long--run trajectory of the accelerator industry suggests that it may be close to the maturity phase of its cycle. If this is the case, how can we measure the benefits of an uncertain breakthrough in acceleration…
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…
We study the incentivized information acquisition problem, where a principal hires an agent to gather information on her behalf. Such a problem is modeled as a Stackelberg game between the principal and the agent, where the principal…
We propose a new principal-agent framework where a principal communicates a roadmap -- a set of plausible outcome models and a prior belief over them -- to guide an agent who is learning the value of innovation. The agent trusts the prior…
We study a dynamic contracting problem with multiple agents and limited commitment. A principal seeks to screen efficient agents using one-period contracts, but is tempted to revise contract terms upon knowing an agent's type. Alterations…
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 study how a principal can jointly shape an agent's timing and action through information. We develop a revelation principle: with intertemporal commitment, the problem simplifies to choosing a joint distribution over stopping times and…
Motivated by school admissions, this paper studies screening in a population with both advantaged and disadvantaged agents. A school is interested in admitting the most skilled students, but relies on imperfect test scores that reflect both…
As we increasingly delegate important decisions to intelligent systems, it is essential that users understand how algorithmic decisions are made. Prior work has often taken a technocentric approach to transparency. In contrast, we explore…
This paper studies a dynamic model of information acquisition, in which information might be secretly manipulated. A principal must choose between a safe action with known payoff and a risky action with uncertain payoff, favoring the safe…
I examine how a decision maker can incentivize an expert to reveal novel actions, expanding the set from which he can choose, without making ex-ante commitments regarding as-of-yet unrevealed actions. The outcomes achievable by any…
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…
We study the problem of designing an optimal sequence of incentives that a principal should offer to an agent so that the agent's optimal behavior under the incentives realizes the principal's objective expressed as a temporal logic…
In this paper, we study belief elicitation about an uncertain future event, where the reports will affect a principal's decision. We study two problems that can arise in this setting: (1) Agents may have an interest in the outcome of the…
Motivating careerists is challenging for political organizations. Without explicit contracts, careerists often pander to public opinions or their superiors' preferences. Worse, when tasked with implementing these distorted decisions, they…
Priority-based allocation of individuals to positions are pervasive, and elimination of justified envy is often, an absolute requirement. This leaves serial dictatorship (SD) as the only rule that avoids justified envy under standard direct…
Firms have access to abundant data on market participants. They use these data to target contracts to agents with specific characteristics, and describe these contracts in opaque terms. In response to such practices, recent proposed…
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 introduce a model of probabilistic verification in mechanism design. The principal elicits a message from the agent and then selects a test to give the agent. The agent's true type determines the probability with which he can pass each…