Related papers: Approximate Optimality of Linear Contracts Under U…
We study principal-agent problems in which a principal commits to an outcome-dependent payment scheme -- called contract -- in order to induce an agent to take a costly, unobservable action leading to favorable outcomes. We consider 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 analyze conditional optimization problems arising in discrete time Principal-Agent problems of delegated portfolio optimization with linear contracts. Applying tools from Conditional Analysis we show that some results known in the…
We introduce a new model of combinatorial contracts in which a principal delegates the execution of a costly task to an agent. To complete the task, the agent can take any subset of a given set of unobservable actions, each of which has an…
Real-world contracts are often ambiguous. While recent work by D\"utting, Feldman, Peretz, and Samuelson (EC 2023, Econometrica 2024) demonstrates that ambiguous contracts can yield large gains for the principal, their optimal solutions…
We study a Bayesian contract design problem in which a principal interacts with an unknown agent. We consider the single-parameter uncertainty model introduced by Alon et al. [2021], in which the agent's type is described by a single…
We study hidden-action principal-agent problems with multiple agents. These are problems in which a principal commits to an outcome-dependent payment scheme in order to incentivize some agents to take costly, unobservable actions that lead…
We propose a distributionally robust principal agent formulation, which generalizes some common variants of worst-case and Bayesian principal agent problems. We construct a theoretical framework to certify whether any surjective contract…
In a dynamic matching market, such as a marriage or job market, how should agents balance accepting a proposed match with the cost of continuing their search? We consider this problem in a discrete setting, in which agents have cardinal…
We introduce a novel model of contracts with combinatorial actions that accounts for sequential and adaptive agent behavior. As in the standard model, a principal delegates the execution of a costly project to an agent. There are $n$…
This paper studies optimal contract design in private market investing, focusing on internal decision making in venture capital and private equity firms. A principal relies on an agent who privately exerts costly due diligence effort and…
In a fixed time horizon, appropriately executing a large amount of a particular asset -- meaning a considerable portion of the volume traded within this frame -- is challenging. Especially for illiquid or even highly liquid but also highly…
We consider budget feasible mechanisms for procurement auctions with additive valuation functions. For the divisible case, where agents can be allocated fractionally, there exists an optimal mechanism with approximation guarantee $e/(e-1)$…
The efficacy of robust optimization spans a variety of settings with uncertainties bounded in predetermined sets. In many applications, uncertainties are affected by decisions and cannot be modeled with current frameworks. This paper takes…
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…
In this paper, we initiate the computational problem of jointly designing information and contracts. We consider three possible classes of contracts with decreasing flexibility and increasing simplicity: ambiguous contracts, menus of…
We study a robust contract design problem with deferred inspection, in which a principal allocates a scarce resource to an agent, observes the agent's realized outcome ex post at negligible cost, and conditions transfers on this information…
Can a principal still offer optimal dynamic contracts that are linear in end-of-period outcomes when the agent controls a process that exhibits memory? We provide a positive answer by considering a general Gaussian setting where the output…
Most work in mechanism design assumes that buyers are risk neutral; some considers risk aversion arising due to a non-linear utility for money. Yet behavioral studies have established that real agents exhibit risk attitudes which cannot be…
Robust optimization methods have shown practical advantages in a wide range of decision-making applications under uncertainty. Recently, their efficacy has been extended to multi-period settings. Current approaches model uncertainty either…