Related papers: Indicator Choice in Pay-for-Performance

A principal contracts with an agent who sequentially searches over projects to generate a prize. The principal initially knows only one of the agent's available projects and evaluates a contract by its worst-case performance. We…

We consider moral hazard problems where a principal has access to rich monitoring data about an agent's action. Rather than focusing on optimal contracts (which are known to in general be complicated), we characterize the optimal rate at…

When machine learning is outsourced to a rational agent, conflicts of interest might arise and severely impact predictive performance. In this work, we propose a theoretical framework for incentive-aware delegation of machine learning…

We study a screening problem in which an agent privately observes a set of feasible technologies and can strategically disclose only a subset to the principal. The principal then takes an action whose payoff consequences for both players…

We analyze a model of selling a single object to a principal-agent pair who want to acquire the object for a firm. The principal and the agent have different assessments of the object's value to the firm. The agent is budget-constrained…

Principal-agent problems model scenarios where a principal incentivizes an agent to take costly, unobservable actions through the provision of payments. Such problems are ubiquitous in several real-world applications, ranging from…

We consider a continuous time Principal-Agent model on a finite time horizon, where we look for the existence of an optimal contract both parties agreed on. Contrary to the main stream, where the principal is modelled as risk-neutral, we…

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…

The problem of computing near-optimal contracts in combinatorial settings has recently attracted significant interest in the computer science community. Previous work has provided a rich body of structural and algorithmic insights into this…

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…

Models of economic decision makers often include idealized assumptions, such as rationality, perfect foresight, and access to all relevant pieces of information. These assumptions often assure the models' internal validity, but, at the same…

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…

Firms have access to abundant data on market participants. They use these data to target contracts to agents with specific characteristics, and describe these contracts in opaque terms. In response to such practices, recent proposed…

We characterize the optimal reward functions (scoring rules) that incentivize an agent to acquire information and report it truthfully to the principal. The optimal scoring rules let the agent make a simple binary bet in single-dimensional…

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…

A principal provides nondiscriminatory incentives for independent and identical agents. The principal cannot observe the agents' actions, nor does she know the entire set of actions available to them. It is shown, very generally, that any…

We show that in delegation problems, a principal benefits from belief misalignment vis-\`a-vis an agent when the latter can flexibly acquire costly information. The agent optimally succumbs to confirmatory learning, leading him to favor the…

We study a two-period moral hazard problem; there are two agents, with action sets that are unknown to the principal. The principal contracts with each agent sequentially, and seeks to maximize the worst-case discounted sum of payoffs,…

Many real-life contractual relations differ completely from the clean, static model at the heart of principal-agent theory. Typically, they involve repeated strategic interactions of the principal and agent, taking place under uncertainty…

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…