Related papers: Combinatorial Contracts
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…
Assortment optimization refers to the problem of designing a slate of products to offer potential customers, such as stocking the shelves in a convenience store. The price of each product is fixed in advance, and a probabilistic choice…
There are many settings in which a principal performs a task by delegating it to an agent, who searches over possible solutions and proposes one to the principal. This describes many aspects of the workflow within organizations, as well as…
A large fraction of total healthcare expenditure occurs due to end-of-life (EOL) care, which means it is important to study the problem of more carefully incentivizing necessary versus unnecessary EOL care because this has the potential to…
Financial options are contracts that specify the right to buy or sell an underlying asset at a strike price by an expiration date. Standard exchanges offer options of predetermined strike values and trade options of different strikes…
Many combinatorial optimization problems are often considered intractable to solve exactly or by approximation. An example of such problem is maximum clique which -- under standard assumptions in complexity theory -- cannot be solved in…
We show that in delegation problems, a principal benefits from belief misalignment vis-\`a-vis an agent when the latter can flexibly acquire costly information. The agent optimally succumbs to confirmatory learning, leading him to favor the…
Contract theory typically assumes full commitment by the principal, but many contracts fix some payoff-relevant decisions while leaving others discretionary. We ask when imperfect commitment is equivalent to full commitment. For contracts…
Many real-life contractual relations differ completely from the clean, static model at the heart of principal-agent theory. Typically, they involve repeated strategic interactions of the principal and agent, taking place under uncertainty…
We study combinatorial auctions with interdependent valuations. In such settings, each agent $i$ has a private signal $s_i$ that captures her private information, and the valuation function of every agent depends on the entire signal…
We study the problem of multilateral collaboration among agents with transferable utilities. Any group of agents can sign a contract consisting of a primitive contract and monetary transfers among the signatories. We propose a dynamic…
Adding a capacity constraint to a hidden-action principal-agent problem results in the same set of Pareto optimal contracts as the unconstrained problem where output is scaled down by a constant factor. This scaling factor is increasing in…
We consider a single buyer with a combinatorial preference that would like to purchase related products and services from different vendors, where each vendor supplies exactly one product. We study the general case where subsets of products…
Following the recent literature on make take fees policies, we consider an exchange wishing to set a suitable contract with several market makers in order to improve trading quality on its platform. To do so, we use a principal-agent…
We consider budget feasible mechanisms for procurement auctions with additive valuation functions. For the divisible case, where agents can be allocated fractionally, there exists an optimal mechanism with approximation guarantee $e/(e-1)$…
In this paper, we consider a network of agents that has to self-assign a set of tasks while respecting resource constraints. One possible formulation is the Generalized Assignment Problem, where the goal is to find a maximum payoff while…
This paper studies the provision of incentives for information acquisition. Information is costly for an agent to acquire and unobservable to a principal. We show that any Pareto optimal contract has a decomposition into a fraction of…
We consider Incentive Decision Processes, where a principal seeks to reduce its costs due to another agent's behavior, by offering incentives to the agent for alternate behavior. We focus on the case where a principal interacts with a…
This paper derives polynomial-time approximation schemes for several NP-hard stochastic optimization problems from the algorithmic mechanism design and operations research literatures. The problems we consider involve a principal or seller…
AI-assisted task delegation is increasingly common, yet human effort in such systems is costly and typically unobserved. Recent work by Bastani and Cachon (2025); Sambasivan et al. (2021) shows that accuracy-based payment schemes suffer…