Related papers: Incomplete Information VCG Contracts for Common Ag…

We initiate the study of computing (near-)optimal contracts in succinctly representable principal-agent settings. Here optimality means maximizing the principal's expected payoff over all incentive-compatible contracts---known in economics…

The interconnectivity of cyber and physical systems and Internet of things has created ubiquitous concerns of cyber threats for enterprise system managers. It is common that the asset owners and enterprise network operators need to work…

How to optimally persuade an agent who has a private type? When elicitation is feasible, this amounts to a fairly standard principal-agent-style mechanism design problem, where the persuader employs a mechanism to first elicit the agent's…

When multiple informative equilibria are possible in a general cheap talk game, how much information can a principal guarantee herself? To answer this question, I define the notion of worst-case implementation-implementation via the worst…

We consider a dynamic moral hazard problem between a principal and an agent, where the sole instrument the principal has to incentivize the agent is the disclosure of information. The principal aims at maximizing the (discounted) number of…

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…

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…

This paper proposes a method to design an optimal dynamic contract between a principal and an agent, who has the authority to control both the principal's revenue and an engineered system. The key characteristic of our problem setting is…

We consider a general class of multi-agent games in networks, namely the generalized vertex coloring games (G-VCGs), inspired by real-life applications of the venue selection problem in events planning. Certain utility responding to the…

In revenue maximization of selling a digital product in a social network, the utility of an agent is often considered to have two parts: a private valuation, and linearly additive influences from other agents. We study the incomplete…

We consider a continuous time Principal-Agent model on a finite time horizon, where we look for the existence of an optimal contract both parties agreed on. Contrary to the main stream, where the principal is modelled as risk-neutral, we…

Information diffusion and influence maximization are important and extensively studied problems in social networks. Various models and algorithms have been proposed in the literature in the context of the influence maximization problem. A…

We study information design in multi-agent systems (MAS) with binary actions and strategic complementarities, where an external designer influences behavior only through signals. Agents play the smallest-equilibrium of the induced Bayesian…

We consider the optimization problem of a multi-resource, multi-unit VCG auction that produces an optimal, i.e., non-approximated, social welfare. We present an algorithm that solves this optimization problem with pseudo-polynomial…

In this paper, we take a mechanism design approach to optimal assignment problems with asymmetrically informed buyers. In addition, the surplus generated by an assignment of a buyer to a seller may be adversely affected by externalities…

Linear contracts are ubiquitous in practice, yet optimal contract theory often prescribes complex, nonlinear structures. We provide a distributional robustness justification for linear contracts. We study a principal-agent problem where the…

We introduce and study a computational version of the principal-agent problem -- a classic problem in Economics that arises when a principal desires to contract an agent to carry out some task, but has incomplete information about the agent…

Contract theory studies how a principal can incentivize agents to exert costly, unobservable effort through performance-based payments. While classical economic models provide elegant characterizations of optimal solutions, modern…

While the classic Vickrey-Clarke-Groves mechanism ensures incentive compatibility for a static one-shot game, it does not appear to be feasible to construct a dominant truth-telling mechanism for agents that are stochastic dynamic systems.…

We introduce a novel model of contracts with combinatorial actions that accounts for sequential and adaptive agent behavior. As in the standard model, a principal delegates the execution of a costly project to an agent. There are $n$…