Related papers: Regret-Minimizing Contracts: Agency Under Uncertai…
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 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 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…
An agent observes the set of available projects and proposes some, but not necessarily all, of them. A principal chooses one or none from the proposed set. We solve for a mechanism that minimizes the principal's worst-case regret. We…
In principal-agent models, a principal offers a contract to an agent to perform a certain task. The agent exerts a level of effort that maximizes her utility. The principal is oblivious to the agent's chosen level of effort, and conditions…
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 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 study a principal-agent problem with adverse selection, where the principal does not know the agent's true cost but must design a contract to optimize a specific criterion. Unlike standard screening frameworks that allow for…
We explore the deliberate infusion of ambiguity into the design of contracts. We show that when the agent is ambiguity-averse and hence chooses an action that maximizes their minimum utility, the principal can strictly gain from using an…
We study principal-agent problems in which a principal commits to an outcome-dependent payment scheme (a.k.a. contract) so as to induce an agent to take a costly, unobservable action. We relax the assumption that the principal perfectly…
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…
Mechanism design has found considerable application to the construction of agent-interaction protocols. In the standard setting, the type (e.g., utility function) of an agent is not known by other agents, nor is it known by the mechanism…
In the classical principal-agent problem, a principal must design a contract to incentivize an agent to perform an action on behalf of the principal. We study the classical principal-agent problem in a setting where the agent can be of one…
We study the role of regulatory inspections in a contract design problem in which a principal interacts separately with multiple agents. Each agent's hidden action includes a dimension that determines whether they undertake an extra costly…
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…
In cooperative multiagent planning, it can often be beneficial for an agent to make commitments about aspects of its behavior to others, allowing them in turn to plan their own behaviors without taking the agent's detailed behavior into…
We consider a hidden-action principal-agent model, in which actions require different amounts of effort, and the agent privately knows his ability that determines his cost of effort. We show that linear contracts admit approximation…
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…
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…
A rich class of mechanism design problems can be understood as incomplete-information games between a principal who commits to a policy and an agent who responds, with payoffs determined by an unknown state of the world. Traditionally,…