Related papers: Mechanisms without transfers for fully biased agen…

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…

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 the assignment problem of objects to agents with heterogeneous preferences under distributional constraints. Each agent is associated with a publicly known type and has a private ordinal ranking over objects. We are interested in…

We study a principal-agent team production model. The principal hires a team of agents to participate in a common production task. The exact effort of each agent is unobservable and unverifiable, but the total production outcome (e.g. the…

A principal uses payments conditioned on stochastic outcomes of a team project to elicit costly effort from the team members. We develop a multi-agent generalization of a classic first-order approach to contract optimization by leveraging…

A principal hires an agent to acquire soft information about an unknown state. Even though neither how the agent learns nor what the agent discovers are contractible, we show the principal is unconstrained as to what information the agent…

When allocating indivisible resources or tasks, an envy-free allocation or equitable allocation may not exist. We present a sufficient condition and an algorithm to achieve envy-freeness and equitability when monetary transfers are allowed.…

Fraud can pose a challenge in many resource allocation domains, including social service delivery and credit provision. For example, agents may misreport private information in order to gain benefits or access to credit. To mitigate this, a…

We study the incentive properties of envy-free mechanisms for the allocation of rooms and payments of rent among financially constrained roommates. Each agent reports her values for rooms, her housing earmark (soft budget), and an index…

Motivating careerists is challenging for political organizations. Without explicit contracts, careerists often pander to public opinions or their superiors' preferences. Worse, when tasked with implementing these distorted decisions, they…

We investigate the power of randomness in the context of a fundamental Bayesian optimal mechanism design problem--a single seller aims to maximize expected revenue by allocating multiple kinds of resources to "unit-demand" agents with…

We study non-monetary mechanisms for the fair and efficient allocation of reusable public resources, i.e., resources used for varying durations. We consider settings where a limited resource is repeatedly shared among a set of agents, each…

We study Bayesian mechanism design problems in settings where agents have budgets. Specifically, an agent's utility for an outcome is given by his value for the outcome minus any payment he makes to the mechanism, as long as the payment is…

Appropriate decisions depend on information gathered beforehand, yet such information is often obtained through intermediaries with biased preferences. Motivated by settings such as testing and recertification in organ transplantation, we…

We study the problem of fairly and efficiently allocating a set of items among strategic agents with additive valuations, where items are either all indivisible or all divisible. When items are goods, numerous positive and negative results…

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…

This paper analyzes repeated version of the bilateral trade model where the independent payoff relevant private information of the buyer and the seller is correlated across time. Using this setup it makes the following five contributions.…

We study fair division of divisible goods under generalized assignment constraints. Here, each good has an agent-specific value and size, and every agent has a budget constraint that limits the total size of the goods she can receive. Since…

We study mechanisms for an allocation of goods among agents, where agents have no incentive to lie about their true values (incentive compatible) and for which no agent will seek to exchange outcomes with another (envy-free). Mechanisms…

This paper develops a decomposition methodology for common agency games in which each principal's payoff depends on her own outcome and the agent's type, but not on rivals' outcomes. The key step reduces each principal's best-response…