Related papers: Combinatorial Contracts
We study principal-agent problems in which a principal commits to an outcome-dependent payment scheme -- called contract -- in order to induce an agent to take a costly, unobservable action leading to favorable outcomes. We consider a…
A principal contracts with an agent through an informed delegate. Although the principal cannot directly mediate the interaction, she can restrict the menus of contracts the delegate may offer. We characterize the outcomes implementable…
A contract is an economic tool used by a principal to incentivize one or more agents to exert effort on her behalf, by defining payments based on observable performance measures. A key challenge addressed by contracts -- known in economics…
The problem of computing near-optimal contracts in combinatorial settings has recently attracted significant interest in the computer science community. Previous work has provided a rich body of structural and algorithmic insights into this…
We study multi-agent contract design, where a principal incentivizes a team of agents to take costly actions that jointly determine the project success via a combinatorial reward function. While prior work largely focuses on unconstrained…
When machine learning is outsourced to a rational agent, conflicts of interest might arise and severely impact predictive performance. In this work, we propose a theoretical framework for incentive-aware delegation of machine learning…
Principal-agent problems model scenarios where a principal incentivizes an agent to take costly, unobservable actions through the provision of payments. Such problems are ubiquitous in several real-world applications, ranging from…
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…
We consider the principal-agent problem with heterogeneous agents. Previous works assume that the principal signs independent incentive contracts with every agent to make them invest more efforts on the tasks. However, in many…
A principal selects a team of agents for collaborating on a joint project. The principal aims to design a revenue-optimal contract that incentivize the team of agents to exert costly effort while satisfying fairness constraints. We show…
In the classical principal-agent problem, a principal must design a contract to incentivize an agent to perform an action on behalf of the principal. We study the classical principal-agent problem in a setting where the agent can be of one…
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…
We study principal-agent problems in which a principal commits to an outcome-dependent payment scheme (a.k.a. contract) so as to induce an agent to take a costly, unobservable action. We relax the assumption that the principal perfectly…
This paper explores the economic interactions within modern crowdsourcing markets. In these markets, employers issue requests for tasks, platforms facilitate the recruitment of crowd workers, and workers complete tasks for monetary rewards.…
Consider costly and time-consuming tasks that add up to the success of a project, and must be fitted into a given time-frame. This is an instance of the classic budgeted maximization (knapsack) problem, which admits an FPTAS. Now assume an…
A principal contracts with an agent who sequentially searches over projects to generate a prize. The principal initially knows only one of the agent's available projects and evaluates a contract by its worst-case performance. We…
In this work, we study sequential contracts under matroid constraints. In the sequential setting, an agent can take actions one by one. After each action, the agent observes the stochastic value of the action and then decides which action…
We study optimal contract design for large populations of heterogeneous agents whose actions generate network spillovers represented by an interaction function. In a linear-quadratic framework, we solve the finite-agent problem and its…
We consider the robust contract design problem when the principal only has limited information about the actions the agent can take. The principal evaluates a contract according to its worst-case performance caused by the uncertain action…
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…