Related papers: Buying Opinions
The hidden-action model captures a fundamental problem of principal-agent theory and provides an optimal sharing rule when only the outcome but not the effort can be observed. However, the hidden-action model builds on various explicit and…
I study the optimal design of ratings to motivate agent investment in quality when transfers are unavailable. The principal designs a rating scheme that maps the agent's quality to a (possibly stochastic) score. The agent has private…
An agent has access to multiple information sources, each of which provides information about a different attribute of an unknown state. Information is acquired continuously -- where the agent chooses both which sources to sample from, and…
We study a continuous time contracting model in which a principal hires a risk averse agent to manage a project over a finite horizon and provides sequential payments whose timing is endogenously determined. The resulting nonzero-sum…
In order to study updating rules, we consider the problem of a malevolent principal screening an imperfectly Bayesian agent. We uncover a fundamental dichotomy between underreaction and overreaction to information. If an agent's posterior…
In the conventional principal-agent problem, a principal delegates a task to an agent and formulates a contract to incentivize the agent's actions on behalf of the principal. However, this framework overlooks the information that is…
A network of agents attempt to learn some unknown state of the world drawn by nature from a finite set. Agents observe private signals conditioned on the true state, and form beliefs about the unknown state accordingly. Each agent may face…
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…
In this paper we consider a principal agent problem where the agent is allowed to quit, by incurring a cost. When the current agent quits the job, the principal will hire a new one, possibly with a different type. We characterize the…
We analyze a model of selling a single object to a principal-agent pair who want to acquire the object for a firm. The principal and the agent have different assessments of the object's value to the firm. The agent is budget-constrained…
We propose a new principal-agent framework where a principal communicates a roadmap -- a set of plausible outcome models and a prior belief over them -- to guide an agent who is learning the value of innovation. The agent trusts the prior…
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…
Two agents trade an item in a simultaneous offer setting, where the exchange takes place if and only if the buyer's bid price weakly exceeds the seller's ask price. Each agent is randomly assigned the buyer or seller role. Both agents are…
We study a model of moral hazard with heterogeneous beliefs where each of agent's actions gives rise to a pair of probability distributions over output levels, one representing the beliefs of the agent and the other those of the principal.…
This paper considers dynamic moral hazard settings, in which the consequences of the agent's actions are not precisely understood. In a new continuous-time moral hazard model with drift ambiguity, the agent's unobservable action translates…
We present our approach to the problem of how an agent, within an economic Multi-Agent System, can determine when it should behave strategically (i.e. learn and use models of other agents), and when it should act as a simple price-taker. We…
A principal hires an agent to work on a long-term project that culminates in a breakthrough or a breakdown. At each time, the agent privately chooses to work or shirk. Working increases the arrival rate of breakthroughs and decreases the…
We study a dynamic stopping game between a principal and an agent. The agent is privately informed about his type. The principal learns about the agent's type from a noisy performance measure, which can be manipulated by the agent via a…
We consider moral hazard problems where a principal has access to rich monitoring data about an agent's action. Rather than focusing on optimal contracts (which are known to in general be complicated), we characterize the optimal rate at…
In many settings, an effective way of evaluating objects of interest is to collect evaluations from dispersed individuals and to aggregate these evaluations together. Some examples are categorizing online content and evaluating student…