Related papers: Opaque Contracts
ISPs are increasingly selling "tiered" contracts, which offer Internet connectivity to wholesale customers in bundles, at rates based on the cost of the links that the traffic in the bundle is traversing. Although providers have already…
Congestion control algorithms (CCAs) operate in partially observable environments, lacking direct visibility into link capacities, or competing flows. To ensure fair sharing of network resources, CCAs communicate their fair share through…
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…
In applications such as participatory sensing and crowd sensing, self-interested agents exert costly effort towards achieving an objective for the system operator. We study such a setup where a principal incentivizes multiple agents of…
Recently, Frazier et al. proposed a natural model for crowdsourced exploration of different a priori unknown options: a principal is interested in the long-term welfare of a population of agents who arrive one by one in a multi-armed bandit…
We study the hidden-action principal-agent problem in an online setting. In each round, the principal posts a contract that specifies the payment to the agent based on each outcome. The agent then makes a strategic choice of action that…
Strategic information is valuable either by remaining private (for instance if it is sensitive) or, on the other hand, by being used publicly to increase some utility. These two objectives are antagonistic and leaking this information might…
We study hidden-action principal-agent problems with multiple agents. Unlike previous work, we consider a general setting in which each agent has an arbitrary number of actions, and the joint action induces outcomes according to an…
We study the implementability of stable matchings in a two-sided market model with one-sided incomplete information. Firms' types are publicly known, whereas workers' types are private information. A mechanism generates a matching and…
Informal and privatized transit services, such as minibuses and shared auto-rickshaws, are integral to daily travel in large urban metropolises, providing affordable commutes where a formal public transport system is inadequate and other…
We suggest that the analysis of incomplete contracting developed by law and economics researchers can provide a useful framework for understanding the AI alignment problem and help to generate a systematic approach to finding solutions. We…
General partners (GP) are sometimes paid on a deal-by-deal basis and other times on a whole-portfolio basis. When is one method of payment better than the other? I show that when assets (projects or firms) are highly correlated or when GPs…
We consider a setting where agents take action by following their role models in a social network, and study strategies for a social planner to help agents by revealing whether the role models are positive or negative. Specifically, agents…
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…
We study financial systems from a game-theoretic standpoint. A financial system is represented by a network, where nodes correspond to firms, and directed labeled edges correspond to debt contracts between them. The existence of cycles in…
In this paper we formulate a contract design problem where a primary license holder wishes to profit from its excess spectrum capacity by selling it to potential secondary users/buyers. It needs to determine how to optimally price the…
We study an online learning version of the generalized principal-agent model, where a principal interacts repeatedly with a strategic agent possessing private types, private rewards, and taking unobservable actions. The agent is non-myopic,…
We study the design of an optimal insurance contract in which the insured maximizes her expected utility and the insurer limits the variance of his risk exposure while maintaining the principle of indemnity and charging the premium…
Contract-based design is a promising methodology for taming the complexity of developing sophisticated systems. A formal contract distinguishes between assumptions, which are constraints that the designer of a component puts on the…
We construct an empirically founded model of a repo trade intermediated by two broker-dealers and prove multiple equilibrium and the existence of equilibrium at the joint profit maximizing volume of trade. We then present a smart contract…