Related papers: Ambiguous Contracts
We study a repeated contracting setting in which a Principal adaptively chooses amongst $k$ Agents at each of $T$ rounds. The Agents are non-myopic, and so a mechanism for the Principal induces a $T$-round extensive form game amongst the…
We present a continuous-time contract whereby a top-level player can incentivize a hierarchy of players below him to act in his best interest despite only observing the output of his direct subordinate. This paper extends Sannikov's…
A range of empirical puzzles in finance has been explained as a consequence of traders being averse to ambiguity. Ambiguity averse traders can behave in financial portfolio problems in ways that cannot be rationalized as maximizing…
We initiate the study of online contracts, which integrate the game-theoretic considerations of economic contract theory, with the algorithmic and informational challenges of online algorithm design. Our starting point is the classic online…
From marketing to politics, exploitation of incomplete information through selective communication of arguments is ubiquitous. In this work, we focus on development of an argumentation-theoretic model for manipulable multi-agent…
This paper explores the capacity of artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to autonomously design incentive-compatible contracts in dual-principal-agent settings, a relatively unexplored aspect of algorithmic mechanism design. We develop a…
Limited memory of decision-makers is often neglected in economic models, although it is reasonable to assume that it significantly influences the models' outcomes. The hidden-action model introduced by Holmstr\"om also includes this…
As insurers increasingly behave like financial intermediaries and actively participate in capital markets, understanding the dependence structure between insurance and financial risks becomes crucial for insurers' operations. This paper…
We consider an exchange who wishes to set suitable make-take fees to attract liquidity on its platform. Using a principal-agent approach, we are able to describe in quasi-explicit form the optimal contract to propose to a market maker. This…
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…
A principal funds a multistage project and retains the right to cut the funding if it stagnates at some point. An agent wants to convince the principal to fund the project as long as possible, and can design the flow of information about…
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 $n$…
According to conventional wisdom, ambiguity accelerates optimal timing by decreasing the value of waiting in comparison with the unambiguous benchmark case. We study this mechanism in a multidimensional setting and show that in a…
This work studies the online contract design problem. The principal's goal is to learn the optimal contract that maximizes her utility through repeated interactions, without prior knowledge of the agent's type (i.e., the agent's cost and…
We study the optimal contract problem in the \emph{combinatorial actions} framework of D\"utting et al.~[FOCS'21], where a principal delegates a project to an agent who chooses a subset of hidden, costly actions, and the resulting reward is…
We study how a decision-maker can acquire more information from an agent by reducing her own ability to observe what the agent transmits. In a large class of binary-action games, opacity design is just as good as full commitment to actions…
This paper studies the provision of incentives for information acquisition. Information is costly for an agent to acquire and unobservable to a principal. We show that any Pareto optimal contract has a decomposition into a fraction of…
We consider settings where an uninformed principal must hear arguments from two better-informed agents, corresponding to two possible courses of action that they argue for. The arguments are verifiable in the sense that the true state of…
A contract is an economic tool used by a principal to incentivize one or more agents to exert effort on her behalf, by defining payments based on observable performance measures. A key challenge addressed by contracts -- known in economics…
We experimentally study a game in which success requires a sufficient total contribution by members of a group. There are significant uncertainties surrounding the chance and the total effort required for success. A theoretical model with…