Related papers: Ambiguous Contracts
We study multi-agent contracts, in which a principal delegates a task to multiple agents and incentivizes them to exert effort. Prior research has mostly focused on maximizing the principal's utility, often resulting in highly disparate…
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 a multi-agent contract design problem with moral hazard. In our model, each agent exerts costly effort towards an individual task at which it may either succeed or fail, and the principal, who wishes to encourage effort, has an…
In this paper we show how the relaxation techniques can be used to establish the existence of an optimal contract in presence of information asymmetry. The method we illustrate was initially motivated by the problem of designing optimal…
We study the role of regulatory inspections in a contract design problem in which a principal interacts separately with multiple agents. Each agent's hidden action includes a dimension that determines whether they undertake an extra costly…
Communication is rarely perfect, but rather prone to error of transmission and reception. Often the origin of these errors cannot be properly quantified and is thus imprecisely known. We analyze the impact of an ambiguous noise which may…
We consider the impact of ambiguity on the optimal timing of a class of two-dimensional integral option contracts when the exercise payoff is a positively homogeneous measurable function. Hence, the considered class of exercise payoffs…
Contract theory typically assumes full commitment by the principal, but many contracts fix some payoff-relevant decisions while leaving others discretionary. We ask when imperfect commitment is equivalent to full commitment. For contracts…
A principal and an agent can launch a project under unanimous consent. Their individual payoffs from the project depend on an underlying state, and the agent privately knows his own preference. The principal can conduct a test to learn…
Contract theory studies how a principal can incentivize agents to exert costly, unobservable effort through performance-based payments. While classical economic models provide elegant characterizations of optimal solutions, modern…
Opponent modeling consists in modeling the strategy or preferences of an agent thanks to the data it provides. In the context of automated negotiation and with machine learning, it can result in an advantage so overwhelming that it may…
We study the consequences of information asymmetries and misaligned incentives in settings with multiple independent agents. We model an interaction between a Sender, who holds vital private information but cannot act, and a Receiver, who…
We study a principal-agent problem with adverse selection, where the principal does not know the agent's true cost but must design a contract to optimize a specific criterion. Unlike standard screening frameworks that allow for…
In this paper, we extend the Holmstro\"om and Milgrom problem [47] by adding uncertainty about the volatility of the output for both the Agent and the Principal. We study more precisely the impact of the "Nature" playing against the Agent…
This work considers a repeated principal-agent bandit game, where the principal can only interact with her environment through the agent. The principal and the agent have misaligned objectives and the choice of action is only left to the…
This paper investigates the formal pragmatics of ambiguous expressions by modeling ambiguity in a multi-agent system. Such a framework allows us to give a more refined notion of the kind of information that is conveyed by ambiguous…
We design and implement lab experiments to evaluate the normative appeal of behavior arising from models of ambiguity-averse preferences. We report two main empirical findings. First, we demonstrate that behavior reflects an incomplete…
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…
A privately-informed sender can commit to any disclosure policy towards a receiver. We show that full disclosure is optimal under a sufficient condition with some desirable properties. First, it speaks directly to the utility functions of…
We study games in which a leader makes a single commitment, and then multiple followers (each with a different utility function) respond. In particular, we study ambiguous commitment strategies in these games, in which the leader may commit…