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Related papers: Contracts for acquiring information

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The trade-off between the information gain and the state disturbance is derived for quantum operations on a single qubit prepared in a uniformly distributed pure state. The derivation is valid for a class of measures quantifying the state…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2007-05-23 Konrad Banaszek

The representations of conditional entropy and conditional mutual information are significant in explaining the unique effects among variables. While previous studies based on conditional contrastive sampling have effectively removed…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-07 Keng Hou Leong , Yuxuan Xiu , Wai Kin , Chan

A decision-maker periodically acquires information about a changing state, controlling both the timing and content of updates. I characterize optimal policies using a decomposition of the dynamic problem into optimal stopping and static…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-12-02 César Barilla

We consider a continuous-time linear-quadratic Gaussian control problem with partial observations and costly information acquisition. More precisely, we assume the drift of the state process to be governed by an unobservable…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-08-20 Christoph Knochenhauer , Alexander Merkel , Yufei Zhang

Models of economic decision makers often include idealized assumptions, such as rationality, perfect foresight, and access to all relevant pieces of information. These assumptions often assure the models' internal validity, but, at the same…

General Economics · Economics 2021-07-09 Patrick Reinwald , Stephan Leitner , Friederike Wall

We consider a seller who offers services to a buyer with multi-unit demand. Prior to the realization of demand, the buyer receives a noisy signal of their future demand, and the seller can design contracts based on the reported value of…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-02-13 Dirk Bergemann , Michael C. Wang

In speculative markets, risk-free profit opportunities are eliminated by traders exploiting them. Markets are therefore often described as "informationally efficient", rapidly removing predictable price changes, and leaving only residual…

Trading and Market Microstructure · Quantitative Finance 2013-10-08 Felix Patzelt , Klaus R. Pawelzik

Interacting agents receive public information at no cost and flexibly acquire private information at a cost proportional to entropy reduction. When a policymaker provides more public information, agents acquire less private information,…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2022-04-28 Takashi Ui

We study buyer-optimal procurement mechanisms when quality is contractible. When some costs are borne by every participant of a procurement auction regardless of winning, the classic analysis should be amended. We show that an optimal…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2024-11-20 Pasha Andreyanov , Ilia Krasikov , Alex Suzdaltsev

We introduce a new cost function over experiments, f-information, based on the theory of multivariate statistical divergences, that generalizes Sims's classic model of rational inattention as well as the class of posterior-separable cost…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-10-07 Alex Bloedel , Tommaso Denti , Luciano Pomatto

We study the optimal contract problem in the \emph{combinatorial actions} framework of D\"utting et al.~[FOCS'21], where a principal delegates a project to an agent who chooses a subset of hidden, costly actions, and the resulting reward is…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Michal Feldman , Liat Yashin

In this paper we formulate and study an optimal switching problem under partial information. In our model the agent/manager/investor attempts to maximize the expected reward by switching between different states/investments. However, he is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2014-03-10 Kai Li , Kaj Nyström , Marcus Olofsson

We study the problem of designing mechanisms for \emph{information acquisition} scenarios. This setting models strategic interactions between an uniformed \emph{receiver} and a set of informed \emph{senders}. In our model the senders…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-06-13 Federico Cacciamani , Matteo Castiglioni , Nicola Gatti

Appropriate decisions depend on information gathered beforehand, yet such information is often obtained through intermediaries with biased preferences. Motivated by settings such as testing and recertification in organ transplantation, we…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-02-17 Andres Espitia , Edwin Muñoz-Rodríguez

A wireless system with multiple channels is considered, where each channel has several transmission states. A user learns about the instantaneous state of an available channel by transmitting a control packet in it. Since probing all…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2008-04-11 Sudipto Guha , Kamesh Munagala , Saswati Sarkar

We study hidden-action principal-agent problems with multiple agents. These are problems in which a principal commits to an outcome-dependent payment scheme in order to incentivize some agents to take costly, unobservable actions that lead…

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

We study a natural application of contract design in the context of sequential exploration problems. In our principal-agent setting, a search task is delegated to an agent. The agent performs a sequential exploration of $n$ boxes, suffers…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-01-27 Martin Hoefer , Conrad Schecker , Kevin Schewior

We consider stopping problems in which a decision maker (DM) faces an unknown state of nature and decides sequentially whether to stop and take an irreversible action; pay a fee and obtain additional information; or wait without acquiring…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2022-05-16 Ehud Lehrer , Tao Wang

We study the design of information acquisition games-environments where a designer contracts their action on Sender's choice of experiment and the realized signals about some state-and identify which predictions can be made absent knowledge…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-01-22 Eric Gao , Daniel Luo

This paper investigates third-degree price discrimination under endogenous market segmentation. Segmenting a market requires access to information about consumers, and this information comes with a cost. I explore the trade-offs between the…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2024-06-11 Irfan Tekdir