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Related papers: Contract Design Beyond Hidden-Actions

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We study a repeated Principal Agent problem between a long lived Principal and Agent pair in a prior free setting. In our setting, the sequence of realized states of nature may be adversarially chosen, the Agent is non-myopic, and the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-11-15 Natalie Collina , Aaron Roth , Han Shao

A principal designs an algorithm that generates a publicly observable prediction of a binary state. She must decide whether to act directly based on the prediction or to delegate the decision to an agent with private information but…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2024-02-22 Ruqing Xu

We propose a distributionally robust principal agent formulation, which generalizes some common variants of worst-case and Bayesian principal agent problems. We construct a theoretical framework to certify whether any surjective contract…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2024-01-17 Peter Zhang

This article studies the problem of evaluating the information that a Principal lacks when establishing an incentive contract with an Agent whose effort is not observable. The Principal ("she") pays a continuous rent to the Agent ("he"),…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-04-10 Ishak Hajjej , Caroline Hillairet , Mohamed Mnif

Strategic learning studies how decision rules interact with agents who may strategically change their inputs/features to achieve better outcomes. In standard settings, models assume that the decision-maker's sole scope is to learn a…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-10-23 Valia Efthymiou , Ekaterina Fedorova , Chara Podimata

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,…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2020-09-14 Modibo Camara , Jason Hartline , Aleck Johnsen

We consider the problem of budget feasible mechanism design proposed by Singer (2010), but in a Bayesian setting. A principal has a public value for hiring a subset of the agents and a budget, while the agents have private costs for being…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2015-10-22 Eric Balkanski , Jason D. Hartline

Adding a capacity constraint to a hidden-action principal-agent problem results in the same set of Pareto optimal contracts as the unconstrained problem where output is scaled down by a constant factor. This scaling factor is increasing in…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2024-12-03 Aubrey Clark

In this paper, we study moral hazard problems in contract theory by adding an exogenous Planner to manage the actions of Agents hired by a Principal. We provide conditions ensuring that Pareto optima exist for the Agents using the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-06-06 Thibaut Mastrolia

We present a continuous-time contract whereby a top-level player can incentivize a hierarchy of players below him to act in his best interest despite only observing the output of his direct subordinate. This paper extends Sannikov's…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2015-11-25 Christopher W. Miller , Insoon Yang

Our goal is to solve both problems of adverse selection and moral hazard for multi-agent projects. In our model, each selected agent can work according to his private "capability tree". This means a process involving hidden actions, hidden…

Other Computer Science · Computer Science 2018-01-11 Endre Csóka

We study the problem of designing an optimal sequence of incentives that a principal should offer to an agent so that the agent's optimal behavior under the incentives realizes the principal's objective expressed as a temporal logic…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-03-20 Yagiz Savas , Vijay Gupta , Melkior Ornik , Lillian J. Ratliff , Ufuk Topcu

Systems engineering processes coordinate the effort of different individuals to generate a product satisfying certain requirements. As the involved engineers are self-interested agents, the goals at different levels of the systems…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2023-07-19 Salar Safarkhani , Ilias Bilionis , Jitesh Panchal

I study the optimal design of ratings to motivate agent investment in quality when transfers are unavailable. The principal designs a rating scheme that maps the agent's quality to a (possibly stochastic) score. The agent has private…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-08-11 Peiran Xiao

We study the excludable public project model where the decision is binary (build or not build). In a classic excludable and binary public project model, an agent either consumes the project in its whole or is completely excluded. We study a…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-05-22 Mingyu Guo , Diksha Goel , Guanhua Wang , Yong Yang , Muhammad Ali Babar

This paper proposes a novel continuous-time dynamic contract framework that has a risk-limiting capability. If a principal and an agent enter into such a contract, the principal can optimally manage its performance and risk with a guarantee…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2014-10-10 Insoon Yang , Duncan S. Callaway , Claire J. Tomlin

This work studies the online contract design problem. The principal's goal is to learn the optimal contract that maximizes her utility through repeated interactions, without prior knowledge of the agent's type (i.e., the agent's cost and…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Shiliang Zuo

We introduce a novel problem setting for algorithmic contract design, named the principal-MARL contract design problem. This setting extends traditional contract design to account for dynamic and stochastic environments using Markov Games…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2024-08-20 David Molina Concha , Kyeonghyeon Park , Hyun-Rok Lee , Taesik Lee , Chi-Guhn Lee

A large fraction of total healthcare expenditure occurs due to end-of-life (EOL) care, which means it is important to study the problem of more carefully incentivizing necessary versus unnecessary EOL care because this has the potential to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-03-25 Muyan Jiang , Ying Chen , Xin Chen , Javad Lavaei , Anil Aswani

In a multi-party machine learning system, different parties cooperate on optimizing towards better models by sharing data in a privacy-preserving way. A major challenge in learning is the incentive issue. For example, if there is…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2020-08-11 Mengjing Chen , Yang Liu , Weiran Shen , Yiheng Shen , Pingzhong Tang , Qiang Yang