Related papers: Common Agency with Non-Delegation or Imperfect Com…

Contract theory typically assumes full commitment by the principal, but many contracts fix some payoff-relevant decisions while leaving others discretionary. We ask when imperfect commitment is equivalent to full commitment. For contracts…

We formulate and prove an Agreement Theorem for quantum mechanics (QM), describing when two agents, represented by separate laboratories, can or cannot maintain differing probability estimates of a shared quantum property of interest.…

We consider a general framework of optimal mechanism design under adverse selection and ambiguity about the type distribution of agents. We prove the existence of optimal mechanisms under minimal assumptions on the contract space and prove…

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…

We present a first approximation of agent behaviour in a generalized model in contract theory. This model relaxes some of the the assumptions of one of the classical models allowing to include a broader range of agents. We introduce the…

We study the problem faced by a service provider that has to sell services to a user. In our model the service provider proposes various payment options (a menu) to the user which may be based, for example, on the quality of the service.…

According to Aumann's celebrated theorem, rational agents cannot agree to disagree. In other words, agents who once shared a common prior probability distribution and who have common knowledge about their posteriors cannot assign different…

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 the power of menus of contracts in principal-agent problems with adverse selection (agents can be one of several types) and moral hazard (we cannot observe agent actions directly). For principal-agent problems with $T$ types and…

Agreement theorems are no-go results about rational disagreement: if two agents start from a common prior and their posterior beliefs are common knowledge, they cannot assign different probabilities to the same event. Standard treatments of…

The Contract Net Protocol (1980) introduced coordination through contracts in multi-agent systems. Modern agent protocols standardize connectivity and interoperability; yet, none provide formal, resource governance-normative mechanisms to…

Agent based systems are more common than we may think. A Promise Theory perspective on cooperation, in systems of human-machine agents, offers a unified perspective on organization and functional design with semi-automated efforts, in terms…

Contracts are a well-established approach for describing and analyzing behavioral aspects of web service compositions. The theory of contracts comes equipped with a notion of compatibility between clients and servers that ensures that every…

Motivated by the emergence of decentralized machine learning (ML) ecosystems, we study the delegation of data collection. Taking the field of contract theory as our starting point, we design optimal and near-optimal contracts that deal with…

Moses & Nachum ([7]) identify conceptual flaws in Bacharach's generalization ([3]) of Aumann's seminal "agreeing to disagree" result ([1]). Essentially, Bacharach's framework requires agents' decision functions to be defined over events…

In the principal-agent problem formulated by Myerson'82, agents have private information (type) and make private decisions (action), both of which are unobservable to the principal. Myerson pointed out an elegant linear programming solution…

Promises, impositions, proposals, predictions, and suggestions are categorized as voluntary co-operational methods. The class of voluntary co-operational methods is included in the class of so-called directionals. Directionals are…

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…

We consider the classic principal-agent model of contract theory, in which a principal designs an outcome-dependent compensation scheme to incentivize an agent to take a costly and unobservable action. When all of the model…

Generally, system failures, such as crash failures, Byzantine failures and so on, are considered as common reasons for the inconsistencies of distributed consensus and have been extensively studied. In fact, strategic manipulations by…