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We consider the classic principal-agent model of contract theory, in which a principal designs an outcome-dependent compensation scheme to incentivize an agent to take a costly and unobservable action. When all of the model…
This paper considers the hidden-action model of the principal-agent problem, in which a principal incentivizes an agent to work on a project using a contract. We investigate whether contracts with bounded payments are learnable and…
Linear contracts are ubiquitous in practice, yet optimal contract theory often prescribes complex, nonlinear structures. We provide a distributional robustness justification for linear contracts. We study a principal-agent problem where the…
In principal-agent models, a principal offers a contract to an agent to perform a certain task. The agent exerts a level of effort that maximizes her utility. The principal is oblivious to the agent's chosen level of effort, and conditions…
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…
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…
We explore the deliberate infusion of ambiguity into the design of contracts. We show that when the agent is ambiguity-averse and hence chooses an action that maximizes their minimum utility, the principal can strictly gain from using an…
Principal-agent problems model scenarios where a principal incentivizes an agent to take costly, unobservable actions through the provision of payments. Such problems are ubiquitous in several real-world applications, ranging from…
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…
The problem of computing near-optimal contracts in combinatorial settings has recently attracted significant interest in the computer science community. Previous work has provided a rich body of structural and algorithmic insights into this…
In the classical principal-agent problem, a principal must design a contract to incentivize an agent to perform an action on behalf of the principal. We study the classical principal-agent problem in a setting where the agent can be of one…
We consider a continuous time Principal-Agent model on a finite time horizon, where we look for the existence of an optimal contract both parties agreed on. Contrary to the main stream, where the principal is modelled as risk-neutral, we…
Firms have access to abundant data on market participants. They use these data to target contracts to agents with specific characteristics, and describe these contracts in opaque terms. In response to such practices, recent proposed…
In this paper, we settle the problem of learning optimal linear contracts from data in the offline setting, where agent types are drawn from an unknown distribution and the principal's goal is to design a contract that maximizes her…
We study the classic principal-agent model when the signal observed by the principal is chosen by the agent. We fully characterize the optimal information structure from an agent's perspective in a general moral hazard setting with limited…
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…
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…
Fairness is desirable yet challenging to achieve within multi-agent systems, especially when agents differ in latent traits that affect their abilities. This hidden heterogeneity often leads to unequal distributions of wealth, even when…
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,…
We initiate the study of computing (near-)optimal contracts in succinctly representable principal-agent settings. Here optimality means maximizing the principal's expected payoff over all incentive-compatible contracts---known in economics…