Related papers: Regret-Minimizing Contracts: Agency Under Uncertai…

We consider the mechanism design problem of a principal allocating a single good to one of several agents without monetary transfers. Each agent desires the good and uses it to create value for the principal. We designate this value as the…

A contract is an economic tool used by a principal to incentivize one or more agents to exert effort on her behalf, by defining payments based on observable performance measures. A key challenge addressed by contracts -- known in economics…

Incentive design deals with interaction between a principal and an agent where the former can shape the latter's utility through a policy commitment. It is well known that the principal faces an information rent when dealing with an agent…

We study a general class of Principal-Agent problems in continuous time under hidden action. By formulating the model as a coupled stochastic optimal control problem we are able to find a set of necessary conditions characterizing optimal…

Human dynamics is known to be inhomogeneous and bursty but the detailed understanding of the role of human factors in bursty dynamics is still lacking. In order to investigate their role we devise an agent-based model, where an agent in an…

A principal and an agent can launch a project under unanimous consent. Their individual payoffs from the project depend on an underlying state, and the agent privately knows his own preference. The principal can conduct a test to learn…

We study a model of collective real-time decision-making (or learning) in a social network operating in an uncertain environment, for which no a priori probabilistic model is available. Instead, the environment's impact on the agents in the…

We introduce a new model of combinatorial contracts in which a principal delegates the execution of a costly task to an agent. To complete the task, the agent can take any subset of a given set of unobservable actions, each of which has an…

Many scenarios where agents with restrictions compete for resources can be cast as maximum matching problems on bipartite graphs. Our focus is on resource allocation problems where agents may have restrictions that make them incompatible…

We study a dynamic contracting problem with multiple agents and limited commitment. A principal seeks to screen efficient agents using one-period contracts, but is tempted to revise contract terms upon knowing an agent's type. Alterations…

Companies like Google and Microsoft run billions of auctions every day to sell advertising opportunities. Any change to the rules of these auctions can have a tremendous effect on the revenue of the company and the welfare of the…

Linear contracts are ubiquitous in practice, yet optimal contract theory often prescribes complex, nonlinear structures. We provide a distributional robustness justification for linear contracts. We study a principal-agent problem where the…

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…

It is common to use minimax rules to make decisions for planning when there is great uncertainty on what will happen in the future. Minimax regret is one popular version of this. We give an analysis of the behaviour of minimax rules in the…

We initiate the study of computing (near-)optimal contracts in succinctly representable principal-agent settings. Here optimality means maximizing the principal's expected payoff over all incentive-compatible contracts---known in economics…

While the importance of personalized policymaking is widely recognized, fully personalized implementation remains rare in practice, often due to legal, fairness or cost concerns. We study the problem of policy targeting for a regret-averse…

Most microeconomic models of interest involve optimizing a piecewise linear function. These include contract design in hidden-action principal-agent problems, selling an item in posted-price auctions, and bidding in first-price auctions.…

Optimising queries in real-world situations under imperfect conditions is still a problem that has not been fully solved. We consider finding the optimal order in which to execute a given set of selection operators under partial ignorance…

We consider a principal agent project selection problem with asymmetric information. There are $N$ projects and the principal must select exactly one of them. Each project provides some profit to the principal and some payoff to the agent…

This brief note considers the problem of learning with dynamic-optimizing principal-agent setting, in which the agents are allowed to have global perspectives about the learning process, i.e., the ability to view things according to their…