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Related papers: Contracts for acquiring information

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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…

Methodology · Statistics 2015-09-18 Panos Toulis , David C. Parkes , Elery Pfeffer , James Zou

When discriminating between two pure quantum states, there exists a quantitative tradeoff between the information retrieved by the measurement and the disturbance caused on the unknown state. We derive the optimal tradeoff and provide the…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2007-05-23 Francesco Buscemi , Massimiliano F. Sacchi

We study allocation problems without monetary transfers where agents have correlated types, i.e., hold private information about one another. Such peer information is relevant in various settings, including science funding, allocation of…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-03-21 Axel Niemeyer , Justus Preusser

A principal and an agent can launch a project under unanimous consent. Their individual payoffs from the project depend on an underlying state, and the agent privately knows his own preference. The principal can conduct a test to learn…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-02-06 Yingkai Li , Boli Xu

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…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2024-08-05 Francesco Giovannoni , Toomas Hinnosaar

I consider the monopolistic pricing of informational good. A buyer's willingness to pay for information is from inferring the unknown payoffs of actions in decision making. A monopolistic seller and the buyer each observes a private signal…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2018-10-18 Weijie Zhong

Consider a network design application where we wish to lay down a minimum-cost spanning tree in a given graph; however, we only have stochastic information about the edge costs. To learn the precise cost of any edge, we have to conduct a…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2017-11-02 Sahil Singla

We study the revenue-maximizing mechanism when a buyer's value evolves endogenously because of learning-by-consuming. A seller sells one unit of a divisible good, while the buyer relies on his private, rough valuation to choose his…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2022-09-07 Huiyi Guo , Wei He , Bin Liu

We consider the mechanism design problem of a principal allocating a single good to one of several agents without monetary transfers. Each agent desires the good and uses it to create value for the principal. We designate this value as the…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2024-06-26 Halil İbrahim Bayrak , Çağıl Koçyiğit , Daniel Kuhn , Mustafa Çelebi Pınar

While the success of large language models (LLMs) increases demand for machine-generated text, current pay-per-token pricing schemes create a misalignment of incentives known in economics as moral hazard: Text-generating agents have strong…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-06-13 Eden Saig , Ohad Einav , Inbal Talgam-Cohen

Two firms are engaged in a competitive prediction task. Each firm has two sources of data -- labeled historical data and unlabeled inference-time data -- and uses the former to derive a prediction model, and the latter to make predictions…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2024-03-27 Yotam Gafni , Ronen Gradwohl , Moshe Tennenholtz

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…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-02-22 Martino Bernasconi , Matteo Castiglioni , Alberto Marchesi

When a new product or technology is introduced, potential consumers can learn its quality by trying the product, at a risk, or by letting others try it and free-riding on the information that they generate. We propose a dynamic game to…

Economics · Quantitative Finance 2017-06-27 Matt V. Leduc , Matthew O. Jackson , Ramesh Johari

An agent has access to multiple information sources, each of which provides information about a different attribute of an unknown state. Information is acquired continuously -- where the agent chooses both which sources to sample from, and…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2021-04-27 Annie Liang , Xiaosheng Mu , Vasilis Syrgkanis

We study the informational efficiency of a market with a single traded asset. The price initially differs from the fundamental value, about which the agents have noisy private information (which is, on average, correct). A fraction of…

Trading and Market Microstructure · Quantitative Finance 2014-01-10 Gani Aldashev , Timoteo Carletti , Simone Righi

This paper studies optimal contract design in private market investing, focusing on internal decision making in venture capital and private equity firms. A principal relies on an agent who privately exerts costly due diligence effort and…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Jussi Keppo , Yingkai Li

Snapshots of "best" (or "worst") experience are known to dominate human memory and may thus also have a significant effect on future behaviour. We consider here a model of repeated decision-making where, at every time step, an agent takes…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2022-02-18 Evangelos Mitsokapas , Rosemary J. Harris

Recent technology advances have enabled firms to flexibly process and analyze sophisticated employee performance data at a reduced and yet significant cost. We develop a theory of optimal incentive contracting where the monitoring…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2019-11-22 Anqi Li , Ming Yang

Providing proper economic incentives is essential for the success of dynamic spectrum sharing. Cooperative spectrum sharing is one effective way to achieve this goal. In cooperative spectrum sharing, secondary users (SUs) relay traffics for…

Networking and Internet Architecture · Computer Science 2016-11-17 Lingjie Duan , Lin Gao , Jianwei Huang

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…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-02-01 Matteo Castiglioni , Francesco Bacchiocchi , Alberto Marchesi , Giulia Romano , Nicola Gatti