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Related papers: Contracts for acquiring information

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In the combinatorial-action contract model (D\"utting et al., FOCS'21) a principal delegates the execution of a complex project to an agent, who can choose any subset from a given set of actions. Each set of actions incurs a cost to the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-11-27 Paul Dütting , Michal Feldman , Yoav Gal-Tzur , Aviad Rubinstein

A sender flexibly acquires evidence--which she may pay a third party to certify--to disclose to a receiver. When evidence acquisition is overt, the receiver observes the evidence gathering process irrespective of whether its outcome is…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2022-08-10 Mark Whitmeyer , Kun Zhang

We study Pareto optimality in a decentralized peer-to-peer risk-sharing market where agents' preferences are represented by robust distortion risk measures that are not necessarily convex. We obtain a characterization of Pareto-optimal…

Risk Management · Quantitative Finance 2025-10-08 Mario Ghossoub , Michael B. Zhu , Wing Fung Chong

Learning cooperative policies for multi-agent systems is often challenged by partial observability and a lack of coordination. In some settings, the structure of a problem allows a distributed solution with limited communication. Here, we…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2017-08-01 Roel Dobbe , David Fridovich-Keil , Claire Tomlin

We study risk sharing among agents with preferences modeled by heterogeneous distortion risk measures, who are not necessarily risk averse. Pareto optimality for agents using risk measures is often studied through the lens of…

Risk Management · Quantitative Finance 2026-03-11 Mario Ghossoub , Qinghua Ren , Ruodu Wang

We consider a model where an agent has a repeated decision to make and wishes to maximize their total payoff. Payoffs are influenced by an action taken by the agent, but also an unknown state of the world that evolves over time. Before…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2021-01-20 Nicole Immorlica , Ian Kash , Brendan Lucier

This paper studies the persuasion of a receiver who accesses information only if she exerts costly attention effort. A sender designs an experiment to persuade the receiver to take a specific action. The experiment affects the receiver's…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-04-07 Pietro Dall'Ara

When a game involves many agents or when communication between agents is not possible, it is useful to resort to distributed learning where each agent acts in complete autonomy without any information on the other agents' situations.…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-09-24 Jérôme Taupin , Xavier Leturc , Christophe J. Le Martret

We introduce a new model of combinatorial contracts in which a principal delegates the execution of a costly task to an agent. To complete the task, the agent can take any subset of a given set of unobservable actions, each of which has an…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Paul Duetting , Tomer Ezra , Michal Feldman , Thomas Kesselheim

Extensive monitoring systems generate data that is usually compressed for network transmission. This compressed data might then be processed in the cloud for tasks such as anomaly detection. However, compression can potentially impair the…

Signal Processing · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-09-30 Andriy Enttsel , Alex Marchioni , Andrea Zanellini , Mauro Mangia , Gianluca Setti , Riccardo Rovatti

We study Pareto-optimal risk sharing in economies with heterogeneous attitudes toward risk, where agents' preferences are modeled by distortion risk measures. Building on comonotonic and counter-monotonic improvement results, we show that…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-10-22 Mario Ghossoub , Qinghua Ren , Ruodu Wang

We examine receiver-optimal mechanisms for aggregating information divided across many biased senders. Each sender privately observes an unconditionally independent signal about an unknown state, so no sender can verify another's report. A…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-08-05 James Best , Daniel Quigley , Maryam Saeedi , Ali Shourideh

I study the optimal design of ratings to motivate agent investment in quality when transfers are unavailable. The principal designs a rating scheme that maps the agent's quality to a (possibly stochastic) score. The agent has private…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-08-11 Peiran Xiao

This paper presents a model of costly information acquisition where decision-makers can choose whether to elaborate information superficially or precisely. The former action is costless, while the latter entails a processing cost. Within…

General Economics · Economics 2024-11-27 Federico Vaccari

The buying and selling of information is taking place at a scale unprecedented in the history of commerce, thanks to the formation of online marketplaces for user data. Data providing agencies sell user information to advertisers to allow…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2012-04-26 Moshe Babaioff , Robert Kleinberg , Renato Paes Leme

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…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-06-13 Maneesha Papireddygari , Bo Waggoner

A competitive market is modeled as a game of incomplete information. One player observes some payoff-relevant state and can sell (possibly noisy) messages thereof to the other, whose willingness to pay is contingent on their own beliefs. We…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-05-02 Thomas Falconer , Anubhav Ratha , Jalal Kazempour , Pierre Pinson , Maryam Kamgarpour

We analyze a problem of revealed preference given state-dependent stochastic choice data in which the payoff to a decision maker (DM) only depends on their beliefs about posterior means. Often, the DM must also learn about or pay attention…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2024-11-06 Jeffrey Mensch , Komal Malik

An agent acquires a costly flexible signal before making a decision. We explore to what degree knowledge of the agent's information costs helps predict her behavior. We establish an impossibility result: learning costs alone generate no…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2023-04-05 Elliot Lipnowski , Doron Ravid

This article studies the problem of evaluating the information that a Principal lacks when establishing an incentive contract with an Agent whose effort is not observable. The Principal ("she") pays a continuous rent to the Agent ("he"),…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-04-10 Ishak Hajjej , Caroline Hillairet , Mohamed Mnif