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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…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2015-12-29 Li Han , David Kempe , Ruixin Qiang

The design of research grants has been hypothesized to be a useful tool for influencing researchers and their science. We test this by conducting two thought experiments in a nationally representative survey of academic researchers. First,…

General Economics · Economics 2023-12-12 Kyle Myers , Wei Yang Tham

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…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Jussi Keppo , Yingkai Li

We consider the design of experiments to evaluate treatments that are administered by self-interested agents, each seeking to achieve the highest evaluation and win the experiment. For example, in an advertising experiment, a company wishes…

Methodology · Statistics 2015-09-18 Panos Toulis , David C. Parkes , Elery Pfeffer , James Zou

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…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-02-06 Yingkai Li , Boli Xu

Collaborative machine learning (CML) provides a promising paradigm for democratizing advanced technologies by enabling cost-sharing among participants. However, the potential for rent-seeking behaviors among parties can undermine such…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-03 Bingchen Wang , Zhaoxuan Wu , Fusheng Liu , Bryan Kian Hsiang Low

We study a moral hazard problem with adverse selection: a risk-neutral agent can directly control the output distribution and possess private information about the production environment. The principal designs a menu of contracts satisfying…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-01-08 Siwen Liu

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…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-09-17 Paul Dütting , Michal Feldman , Daniel Peretz , Larry Samuelson

An employer contracts with a worker to incentivize efforts whose productivity depends on ability; the worker then enters a market that pays him contingent on ability evaluation. With non-additive monitoring technology, the interdependence…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-07-31 Tan Gan , Hongcheng Li

We consider active learning under incentive compatibility constraints. The main application of our results is to economic experiments, in which a learner seeks to infer the parameters of a subject's preferences: for example their attitudes…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2019-11-15 Federico Echenique , Siddharth Prasad

When organizations delegate text generation tasks to AI providers via pay-for-performance contracts, expected payments rise when evaluation is noisy. As evaluation methods become more elaborate, the economic benefits of decreased noise are…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-03-19 Eden Saig , Tamar Garbuz , Ariel D. Procaccia , Inbal Talgam-Cohen , Jamie Tucker-Foltz

In a framework close to the one developed by Holmstr\"om and Milgrom [44], we study the optimal contracting scheme between a Principal and several Agents. Each hired Agent is in charge of one project, and can make efforts towards managing…

Economics · Quantitative Finance 2016-05-27 Romuald Elie , Dylan Possamaï

While the success of large language models (LLMs) increases demand for machine-generated text, current pay-per-token pricing schemes create a misalignment of incentives known in economics as moral hazard: Text-generating agents have strong…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-06-13 Eden Saig , Ohad Einav , Inbal Talgam-Cohen

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…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-06-10 Francesco Bacchiocchi , Matteo Castiglioni , Alberto Marchesi , Nicola Gatti

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…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-02-01 Matteo Castiglioni , Alberto Marchesi , Nicola Gatti

Experiments deliver credible treatment-effect estimates but, because they are costly, are often restricted to specific sites, small populations, or particular mechanisms. A common practice across several fields is therefore to combine…

Econometrics · Economics 2025-12-30 Aristotelis Epanomeritakis , Davide Viviano

A sender persuades a strategically naive decisionmaker (DM) by committing privately to an experiment. Sender's choice of experiment is unknown to the DM, who must form her posterior beliefs nonparametrically by applying some learning rule…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-11-10 Arnav Sood , James Best

In principal-agent models, a principal offers a contract to an agent to perform a certain task. The agent exerts a level of effort that maximizes her utility. The principal is oblivious to the agent's chosen level of effort, and conditions…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-07-14 Alon Cohen , Moran Koren , Argyrios Deligkas

A sender first publicly commits to an experiment and then can privately run additional experiments and selectively disclose their outcomes to a receiver. The sender has private information about the maximal number of additional experiments…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-01-12 Yifan Dai , Drew Fudenberg , Harry Pei

In the on-line Explore and Exploit literature, central to Machine Learning, a central planner is faced with a set of alternatives, each yielding some unknown reward. The planner's goal is to learn the optimal alternative as soon as…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2015-07-31 Gal Bahar , Rann Smorodinsky , Moshe Tennenholtz