Related papers: Contract Design With Safety Inspections
In the classical principal-agent hidden-action contract model, a principal delegates the execution of a costly task to an agent. In order to complete the task, the agent chooses an action from a set of actions, where each potential action…
We study a robust contract design problem with deferred inspection, in which a principal allocates a scarce resource to an agent, observes the agent's realized outcome ex post at negligible cost, and conditions transfers on this information…
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…
This paper proposes a method to design an optimal dynamic contract between a principal and an agent, who has the authority to control both the principal's revenue and an engineered system. The key characteristic of our problem setting is…
We introduce a novel model of contracts with combinatorial actions that accounts for sequential and adaptive agent behavior. As in the standard model, a principal delegates the execution of a costly project to an agent. There are $n$…
We study a natural application of contract design in the context of sequential exploration problems. In our principal-agent setting, a search task is delegated to an agent. The agent performs a sequential exploration of $n$ boxes, suffers…
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…
We study a principal-agent team production model. The principal hires a team of agents to participate in a common production task. The exact effort of each agent is unobservable and unverifiable, but the total production outcome (e.g. the…
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…
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…
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,…
We study the fundamental problem of designing contracts in principal-agent problems under uncertainty. Previous works mostly addressed Bayesian settings in which principal's uncertainty is modeled as a probability distribution over agent's…
We study optimal contract design for large populations of heterogeneous agents whose actions generate network spillovers represented by an interaction function. In a linear-quadratic framework, we solve the finite-agent problem and its…
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 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 robust contract design problem when the principal only has limited information about the actions the agent can take. The principal evaluates a contract according to its worst-case performance caused by the uncertain action…
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…
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 study a continuous time contracting model in which a principal hires a risk averse agent to manage a project over a finite horizon and provides sequential payments whose timing is endogenously determined. The resulting nonzero-sum…
We study principal-agent problems where a farsighted agent takes costly actions in an MDP. The core challenge in these settings is that agent's actions are hidden to the principal, who can only observe their outcomes, namely state…