Related papers: Opaque Contracts
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…
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…
This paper explores the economic interactions within modern crowdsourcing markets. In these markets, employers issue requests for tasks, platforms facilitate the recruitment of crowd workers, and workers complete tasks for monetary rewards.…
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…
We propose a new principal-agent framework where a principal communicates a roadmap -- a set of plausible outcome models and a prior belief over them -- to guide an agent who is learning the value of innovation. The agent trusts the prior…
We study a multi-agent contracting problem where agents exert costly effort to achieve individually observable binary outcomes. While the principal can theoretically extract the full social welfare using a discriminatory contract that…
This paper considers a network of agents, where each agent is assumed to take actions optimally with respect to a predefined payoff function involving the latest actions of the agent's neighbors. Neighborhood relationships stem from payoff…
A well-intentioned principal provides information to a rationally inattentive agent without internalizing the agent's cost of processing information. Whatever information the principal makes available, the agent may choose to ignore some.…
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 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…
Many-to-many matching with contracts is studied in the framework of revealed preferences. All preferences are described by choice functions that satisfy natural conditions. Under a no-externality assumption individual preferences can be…
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 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…
The interconnectivity of cyber and physical systems and Internet of things has created ubiquitous concerns of cyber threats for enterprise system managers. It is common that the asset owners and enterprise network operators need to work…
We study optimal contract design for large populations of heterogeneous agents whose actions generate network spillovers represented by an interaction function. In a linear-quadratic framework, we solve the finite-agent problem and its…
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 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…
I analyze long-term contracting in insurance markets with asymmetric information. The buyer privately observes her risk type, which evolves stochastically over time. A long-term contract specifies a menu of insurance policies, contingent on…
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 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…