Related papers: Discovery through Trial Balloons
We study the fundamental problem of designing contracts in principal-agent problems under uncertainty. Previous works mostly addressed Bayesian settings in which principal's uncertainty is modeled as a probability distribution over agent's…
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…
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 examine hypothesis testing within a principal-agent framework, where a strategic agent, holding private beliefs about the effectiveness of a product, submits data to a principal who decides on approval. The principal employs a hypothesis…
We consider a dynamic moral hazard problem between a principal and an agent, where the sole instrument the principal has to incentivize the agent is the disclosure of information. The principal aims at maximizing the (discounted) number of…
We study how to optimally design selection mechanisms, accounting for agents' investment incentives. A principal wishes to allocate a resource of homogeneous quality to a heterogeneous population of agents. The principal commits to a…
We consider a ubiquitous scenario in the Internet economy when individual decision-makers (henceforth, agents) both produce and consume information as they make strategic choices in an uncertain environment. This creates a three-way…
In the principal-agent problem formulated by Myerson'82, agents have private information (type) and make private decisions (action), both of which are unobservable to the principal. Myerson pointed out an elegant linear programming solution…
We study a Bayesian persuasion problem with externalities. In this model, a principal sends signals to inform multiple agents about the state of the world. Simultaneously, due to the existence of externalities in the agents' utilities, the…
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…
This paper studies how uncertainty about problem difficulty shapes problem-solving strategies. I develop a dynamic model where an agent solves a problem by brainstorming approaches of unknown quality and allocating a fixed effort budget…
Decision-makers in high-stakes selection processes often face a fundamental choice: whether to make decisions themselves or to delegate authority to another entity whose incentives may only be partially aligned with their own. Such…
We study a two-period moral hazard problem; there are two agents, with action sets that are unknown to the principal. The principal contracts with each agent sequentially, and seeks to maximize the worst-case discounted sum of payoffs,…
What is the purpose of pre-analysis plans, and how should they be designed? We model the interaction between an agent who analyzes data and a principal who makes a decision based on agent reports. The agent could be the manufacturer of a…
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…
We investigate the mechanism design problem faced by a principal who hires \emph{multiple} agents to gather and report costly information. Then, the principal exploits the information to make an informed decision. We model this problem as a…
We study principal-agent problems where a farsighted agent takes costly actions in an MDP. The core challenge in these settings is that agent's actions are hidden to the principal, who can only observe their outcomes, namely state…
We study a natural application of contract design in the context of sequential exploration problems. In our principal-agent setting, a search task is delegated to an agent. The agent performs a sequential exploration of $n$ boxes, suffers…
We study hidden-action principal-agent problems in which a principal commits to an outcome-dependent payment scheme (called contract) so as to incentivize the agent to take a costly, unobservable action leading to favorable outcomes. In…
We study the Popular Matching problem in multiple models, where the preferences of the agents in the instance may change or may be unknown/uncertain. In particular, we study an Uncertainty model, where each agent has a possible set of…