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Related papers: Contracts for acquiring information

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I study costly information acquisition in a two-sided matching problem, such as matching applicants to schools. An applicant's utility is a sum of common and idiosyncratic components. The idiosyncratic component is unknown to the applicant…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2021-10-22 Georgy Artemov

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…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-03-01 Manuel Wuthrich , Mark York , David C. Parkes

We derive the amount of information retrieved by a quantum measurement in estimating an unknown maximally entangled state, along with the pertaining disturbance on the state itself. The optimal tradeoff between information and disturbance…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2007-05-23 Massimiliano F. Sacchi

How do consultants price expertise? This paper studies a problem of selling information products (expertise) to a buyer (client) who faces decision-making problem under uncertainty. The client is privately informed about the type of…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2024-05-21 Klajdi Hoxha

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-08-08 Siyu Chen , Jibang Wu , Yifan Wu , Zhuoran Yang

Firms strategically disclose product information in order to attract consumers, but recipients often find it costly to process all of it, especially when products have complex features. We study a model of competitive information disclosure…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2020-02-04 Vasudha Jain , Mark Whitmeyer

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…

General Economics · Economics 2020-04-15 Stephan Leitner , Friederike Wall

This paper presents a distributed communication model to investigate multistable perception, where a stimulus gives rise to multiple competing perceptual interpretations. We formalize stable perception as consensus achieved through…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-10-19 Yuqing Kong

Incentive design deals with interaction between a principal and an agent where the former can shape the latter's utility through a policy commitment. It is well known that the principal faces an information rent when dealing with an agent…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Raj Kiriti Velicheti , Subhonmesh Bose , Tamer Başar

This paper is concerned with quantum data compression of asymptotically many independent and identically distributed copies of ensembles of mixed quantum states. The encoder has access to a side information system. The figure of merit is…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2024-06-21 Zahra Baghali Khanian , Kohdai Kuroiwa , Debbie Leung

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…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-01-12 Halil I. Bayrak , Martin Bichler

The mutual information between a set of stimuli and the elicited neural responses is compared to the corresponding decoded information. The decoding procedure is presented as an artificial distortion of the joint probabilities between…

Biological Physics · Physics 2007-05-23 Ines Samengo

An agent acquires information dynamically until her belief about a binary state reaches an upper or lower threshold. She can choose any signal process subject to a constraint on the rate of entropy reduction. Strategies are ordered by "time…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2024-08-23 Daniel Chen , Weijie Zhong

In principal-agent models, a principal offers a contract to an agent to perform a certain task. The agent exerts a level of effort that maximizes her utility. The principal is oblivious to the agent's chosen level of effort, and conditions…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-07-14 Alon Cohen , Moran Koren , Argyrios Deligkas

We consider a data analyst's problem of purchasing data from strategic agents to compute an unbiased estimate of a statistic of interest. Agents incur private costs to reveal their data and the costs can be arbitrarily correlated with their…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2018-09-06 Yiling Chen , Nicole Immorlica , Brendan Lucier , Vasilis Syrgkanis , Juba Ziani

This paper studies the optimal mechanism to motivate effort in a dynamic principal-agent model without transfers. An agent is engaged in a task with uncertain future rewards and can quit at any time. The principal knows the reward and…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-01-16 Chang Liu

We consider the classic principal-agent model of contract theory, in which a principal designs an outcome-dependent compensation scheme to incentivize an agent to take a costly and unobservable action. When all of the model…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2020-08-11 Paul Dütting , Tim Roughgarden , Inbal Talgam-Cohen

An uninformed sender publicly commits to an informative experiment about an uncertain state, privately observes its outcome, and sends a cheap-talk message to a receiver. We provide an algorithm valid for arbitrary state-dependent…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2024-05-10 Qianjun Lyu , Wing Suen

In the conventional principal-agent problem, a principal delegates a task to an agent and formulates a contract to incentivize the agent's actions on behalf of the principal. However, this framework overlooks the information that is…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-04-20 Yirui Zhang , Zhixuan Fang

A forward-looking agent observes signals of a state that follows a Gaussian AR(1) process. He balances the cost of having imprecise beliefs with the cost of acquiring more precise signals. I characterize his optimal information acquisition…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-04-29 Benjamin Davies