Related papers: Setting Interim Deadlines to Persuade
This paper studies the design of optimal proper scoring rules when the principal has partial knowledge of an agent's signal distribution. Recent work characterizes the proper scoring rules that maximize the increase of an agent's payoff…
A rich class of mechanism design problems can be understood as incomplete-information games between a principal who commits to a policy and an agent who responds, with payoffs determined by an unknown state of the world. Traditionally,…
We study a repeated Principal Agent problem between a long lived Principal and Agent pair in a prior free setting. In our setting, the sequence of realized states of nature may be adversarially chosen, the Agent is non-myopic, and the…
In this work, we study sequential contracts under matroid constraints. In the sequential setting, an agent can take actions one by one. After each action, the agent observes the stochastic value of the action and then decides which action…
We characterize the optimal reward functions (scoring rules) that incentivize an agent to acquire information and report it truthfully to the principal. The optimal scoring rules let the agent make a simple binary bet in single-dimensional…
We analyze a principal-agent procurement problem in which the principal (she) is unaware some of the marginal cost types of the agent (he). Communication arises naturally as some types of the agent may have an incentive to raise the…
When a new product or technology is introduced, potential consumers can learn its quality by trying the product, at a risk, or by letting others try it and free-riding on the information that they generate. We propose a dynamic game to…
Previous research into agent communication has shown that a pre-trained guide can speed up the learning process of an imitation learning agent. The guide achieves this by providing the agent with discrete messages in an emerged language…
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…
We consider a Stackelberg game in which a principal (she) establishes a two-stage contract with a non-myopic agent (he) whose type is unknown. The contract takes the form of an incentive function mapping the agent's first-stage action to…
We study a new class of contract design problems where a principal delegates the execution of multiple projects to a set of agents. The principal's expected reward from each project is a combinatorial function of the agents working on it.…
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…
A principal delegates a project to a team $S$ from a pool of $n$ agents. The project's value if all agents in $S$ exert costly effort is $f(S)$. To incentivize the agents to participate, the principal assigns each agent $i\in S$ a share…
We introduce a dynamic mechanism design problem in which the designer wants to offer for sale an item to an agent, and another item to the same agent at some point in the future. The agent's joint distribution of valuations for the two…
We study a dynamic information design problem in a finite-horizon setting consisting of two strategic and long-term optimizing agents, namely a principal (he) and a detector (she). The principal observes the evolution of a Markov chain that…
In the combinatorial-action contract model (D\"utting et al., FOCS'21) a principal delegates the execution of a complex project to an agent, who can choose any subset from a given set of actions. Each set of actions incurs a cost to the…
The emergent behavior of a distributed system is conditioned by the information available to the local decision-makers. Therefore, one may expect that providing decision-makers with more information will improve system performance; in this…
I study the optimal provision of information in a long-term relationship between a sender and a receiver. The sender observes a persistent, evolving state and commits to send signals over time to the receiver, who sequentially chooses…
This paper examines the optimal contracts in a two-dimensional screening model where one dimension(group identity) is verifiable by agents but not falsifiable. A principal offers contracts to agents who differ in cost types and group…
Incentives are more likely to elicit desired outcomes when they are designed based on accurate models of agents' strategic behavior. A growing literature, however, suggests that people do not quite behave like standard economic agents in a…