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We study the robust regulation of contracts in moral hazard problems. A firm offers a contract to incentivise a worker protected by limited liability. A regulator restricts the set of permissible contracts to (i) improve efficiency and (ii)…
What type of delegation contract should be offered when facing a risk of the magnitude of the pandemic we are currently experiencing and how does the likelihood of an exogenous early termination of the relationship modify the terms of a…
This paper revisits the classic instrument choice problem in a setting with consumption externalities, through the lens of robust mechanism design. A regulator can implement any incentive-compatible policy but is uncertain about how…
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…
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…
Participatory budgeting (PB) is a democratic process for allocating funds to projects based on the votes of members of the community. Different rules have been used to aggregate participants' votes. Past research has studied the trade-off…
This paper studies delegation in a model of discrete choice. In the delegation problem, an uninformed principal must consult an informed agent to make a decision. Both the agent and principal have preferences over the decided-upon action…
We study the optimal contract problem in the \emph{combinatorial actions} framework of D\"utting et al.~[FOCS'21], where a principal delegates a project to an agent who chooses a subset of hidden, costly actions, and the resulting reward is…
Self-organising multi-agent systems regulate their components' behaviour voluntarily, according to a set of socially-constructed, mutually-agreed, and mutable social arrangements. In some systems, these arrangements may be applied with a…
We study a multi-agent contracting problem where agents exert costly effort to achieve individually observable binary outcomes. While the principal can theoretically extract the full social welfare using a discriminatory contract that…
Motivated by the emergence of decentralized machine learning (ML) ecosystems, we study the delegation of data collection. Taking the field of contract theory as our starting point, we design optimal and near-optimal contracts that deal with…
We consider a general framework of optimal mechanism design under adverse selection and ambiguity about the type distribution of agents. We prove the existence of optimal mechanisms under minimal assumptions on the contract space and prove…
We study a moral hazard problem with adverse selection: a risk-neutral agent can directly control the output distribution and possess private information about the production environment. The principal designs a menu of contracts satisfying…
Extracting from shared resources requires making choices to balance personal profit and sustainability. We present the results of a behavioural experiment wherein we manipulate the default extraction from a finite resource. Participants…
A proposer requires the approval of a veto player to change a status quo. Preferences are single peaked. Proposer is uncertain about Vetoer's ideal point. We study Proposer's optimal mechanism without transfers. Vetoer is given a menu, or a…
This paper studies contracting in the presence of externalities with a non-contractible outsider. Multiple equilibria arise from strategic symmetry between the insider agent and the outsider. To address strategic uncertainty, the principal…
We study mechanism design problems in the {\em ordinal setting} wherein the preferences of agents are described by orderings over outcomes, as opposed to specific numerical values associated with them. This setting is relevant when agents…
This paper examines the optimal organizational rules that govern the process of dividing a fixed surplus. The process is modeled as a sequential multilateral bargaining game with costly recognition. The designer sets the voting rule --…
This dissertation is motivated by the need, in today's globalist world, for a precise way to enable governments, organisations and other regulatory bodies to evaluate the constraints they place on themselves and others. An organisation's…
Subsidies are commonly used to encourage behaviors that can lead to short- or long-term benefits. Typical examples include subsidized job training programs and provisions of preventive health products, in which both behavioral responses and…