Related papers: Contracting with Heterogeneous Researchers
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…
How can one efficiently share payoffs with collaborators when participating in risky research? First, I show that efficiency can be achieved by allocating payoffs asymmetrically between the researcher who makes a breakthrough ("winner") and…
We characterize incentive compatible mechanisms in environments with hidden types and flexible hidden actions. Our approach introduces extended recommendation schedules that specify prescribed actions also off-path, after misreports. This…
Meta-analyses are commonly performed based on random-effects models, while in certain cases one might also argue in favour of a common-effect model. One such case may be given by the example of two "study twins" that are performed according…
A seller offers a buyer a schedule of transfers and associated product qualities. After observing this schedule, the buyer chooses a flexible costly signal about his type. We show it is without loss to focus on a class of mechanisms that…
Outlier-robust estimation is a fundamental problem and has been extensively investigated by statisticians and practitioners. The last few years have seen a convergence across research fields towards "algorithmic robust statistics", which…
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…
We study a novel class of mechanism design problems in which the outcomes are constrained by the payments. This basic class of mechanism design problems captures many common economic situations, and yet it has not been studied, to our…
This study on public-private research collaboration measures the variation over time of the propensity of academics to collaborate with colleagues from private companies. It also investigates the change in weights of the main drivers…
How do consultants price expertise? This paper studies a problem of selling information products (expertise) to a buyer (client) who faces decision-making problem under uncertainty. The client is privately informed about the type of…
Selective contests can impair participants' overall welfare in overcompetitive environments, such as school admissions. This paper models the situation as an optimal contest design problem with binary actions, treating effort costs as…
Human-annotated preference data play an important role in aligning large language models (LLMs). In this paper, we study two connected questions: how to monitor the quality of human preference annotators and how to incentivize them to…
In this work, we study sequential contracts under matroid constraints. In the sequential setting, an agent can take actions one by one. After each action, the agent observes the stochastic value of the action and then decides which action…
The agency problem emerges in today's large scale machine learning tasks, where the learners are unable to direct content creation or enforce data collection. In this work, we propose a theoretical framework for aligning economic interests…
The use of hypothetical instead of real decision-making incentives remains under debate after decades of economic experiments. Standard incentivized experiments involve substantial monetary costs due to participants' earnings and often…
A principal and $n\ge 2$ agents can launch a project if the principal proposes it and at least $k$ agents accept. Their individual payoffs from the project depend on an ex ante unknown state. The principal can conduct a test to learn about…
Two firms are engaged in a competitive prediction task. Each firm has two sources of data -- labeled historical data and unlabeled inference-time data -- and uses the former to derive a prediction model, and the latter to make predictions…
Identifying cause-effect relations among variables is a key step in the decision-making process. While causal inference requires randomized experiments, researchers and policymakers are increasingly using observational studies to test…
We present a new feature of the open-source model checker Kind 2 which checks whether a component contract is realizable; i.e., it is possible to construct a component such that for any input allowed by the contract assumptions, there is…
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…