Related papers: Contracting with Heterogeneous Researchers
We study the problem of a budget limited buyer who wants to buy a set of items, each from a different seller, to maximize her value. The budget feasible mechanism design problem aims to design a mechanism which incentivizes the sellers to…
A principal contracts with an agent through an informed delegate. Although the principal cannot directly mediate the interaction, she can restrict the menus of contracts the delegate may offer. We characterize the outcomes implementable…
Interdisciplinary research is fundamental when it comes to tackling complex problems in our highly interlinked world, and is on the rise globally. Yet, it is unclear why--in an increasingly competitive academic environment--one should…
In scientific research, collaboration is one of the most effective ways to take advantage of new ideas, skills, resources, and for performing interdisciplinary research. Although collaboration networks have been intensively studied, the…
We study the robust regulation of contracts in moral hazard problems. A firm offers a contract to incentivise a worker protected by limited liability. A regulator restricts the set of permissible contracts to (i) improve efficiency and (ii)…
We study how governments promote social welfare through the design of contracting environments. We model the regulation of contracting as default delegation: the government chooses a delegation set of contract terms it is willing to…
We consider sequential search by an agent who cannot observe the quality of goods but can acquire information by buying signals from a profit-maximizing principal with limited commitment power. The principal can charge higher prices for…
Humans have developed considerable machinery used at scale to create policies and to distribute incentives, yet we are forever seeking ways in which to improve upon these, our institutions. Especially when funding is limited, it is…
Online lending, a phenomenon which is becoming mainstream due to the migration of consumer finance to the Internet and the adoption of AI based lending models, is an example of learning by doing. This paper studies optimal policies for a…
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…
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.…
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…
I consider the monopolistic pricing of informational good. A buyer's willingness to pay for information is from inferring the unknown payoffs of actions in decision making. A monopolistic seller and the buyer each observes a private signal…
One of the key skills of a researcher is noticing what's going on. Both in the experiment one's performing and in one's data: is there something interesting, reason to doubt one's data or suspect that one's theoretical description is…
Established frameworks to understand problems with reproducibility in science begin with the relationship between our understanding of the prior probability of a claim and the statistical certainty that should be demanded of it, and explore…
We examine the trade-off between the provision of incentives to exert costly effort (ex-ante moral hazard) and the incentives needed to prevent the agent from manipulating the profit observed by the principal (ex-post moral hazard).…
We initiate an investigation of learning tasks in a setting where the learner is given access to two competing provers, only one of which is honest. Specifically, we consider the power of such learners in assessing purported properties of…
This study extends Blackwell's (1953) comparison of information to a sequential social learning model, where agents make decisions sequentially based on both private signals and the observed actions of others. In this context, we introduce…
What type of delegation contract should be offered when facing a risk of the magnitude of the pandemic we are currently experiencing and how does the likelihood of an exogenous early termination of the relationship modify the terms of a…
We study a natural combinatorial single-principal multi-agent contract design problem, in which a principal motivates a team of agents to exert effort toward a given task. At the heart of our model is a reward function, which maps the agent…