Related papers: Buying Opinions
A principal funds a multistage project and retains the right to cut the funding if it stagnates at some point. An agent wants to convince the principal to fund the project as long as possible, and can design the flow of information about…
Firms have access to abundant data on market participants. They use these data to target contracts to agents with specific characteristics, and describe these contracts in opaque terms. In response to such practices, recent proposed…
We study a variant of the principal-agent problem in which the principal does not directly observe the agent's effort outcome; rather, she gets a signal about the agent's action according to a variable information structure designed by a…
This paper considers the hidden-action model of the principal-agent problem, in which a principal incentivizes an agent to work on a project using a contract. We investigate whether contracts with bounded payments are learnable and…
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…
In this paper, we study belief elicitation about an uncertain future event, where the reports will affect a principal's decision. We study two problems that can arise in this setting: (1) Agents may have an interest in the outcome of the…
This work considers a repeated principal-agent bandit game, where the principal can only interact with her environment through the agent. The principal and the agent have misaligned objectives and the choice of action is only left to the…
We study how a principal should optimally choose between implementing a new policy and maintaining the status quo when information relevant for the decision is privately held by agents. Agents are strategic in revealing their information;…
We study the incentivized information acquisition problem, where a principal hires an agent to gather information on her behalf. Such a problem is modeled as a Stackelberg game between the principal and the agent, where the principal…
This article studies the problem of evaluating the information that a Principal lacks when establishing an incentive contract with an Agent whose effort is not observable. The Principal ("she") pays a continuous rent to the Agent ("he"),…
In this paper, we study axiomatic foundations of Bayesian persuasion, where a principal (i.e., sender) delegates the task of choice making after informing a biased agent (i.e., receiver) about the payoff relevant uncertain state (see, e.g.,…
When information acquisition is costly but flexible, a principal may rationally acquire information that favors one group over another. The former group faces incentives to invest in becoming productive, while the latter is discouraged from…
A principal must decide between two options. Which one she prefers depends on the private information of two agents. One agent always prefers the first option; the other always prefers the second. Transfers are infeasible. One application…
We investigate the problem of a principal looking to contract an expert to provide a probability forecast for a categorical event. We assume all experts have a common public prior on the event's probability, but can form more accurate…
Methods for learning optimal policies in autonomous agents often assume that the way the domain is conceptualised---its possible states and actions and their causal structure---is known in advance and does not change during learning. This…
We consider a principal agent project selection problem with asymmetric information. There are $N$ projects and the principal must select exactly one of them. Each project provides some profit to the principal and some payoff to the agent…
In a decision-making scenario, a principal could use conditional predictions from an expert agent to inform their choice. However, this approach would introduce a fundamental conflict of interest. An agent optimizing for predictive accuracy…
A principal and $n\ge 2$ agents can launch a project if the principal proposes it and at least $k$ agents accept. Their individual payoffs from the project depend on an ex ante unknown state. The principal can conduct a test to learn about…
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…
We consider a principal-agent problem where the agent may privately choose to acquire relevant information prior to taking a hidden action. This model generalizes two special cases: a classic moral hazard setting, and a more recently…