Related papers: Designing Exploration Contracts
We study the classic principal-agent model when the signal observed by the principal is chosen by the agent. We fully characterize the optimal information structure from an agent's perspective in a general moral hazard setting with limited…
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 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…
This paper considers the hidden-action model of the principal-agent problem, in which a principal incentivizes an agent to work on a project using a contract. We investigate whether contracts with bounded payments are learnable and…
We study a natural competitive-information-design strategic variant for the celebrated Pandora's Box problem (Weitzman, 1979), where each box is associated with a strategic information sender who can design what information about the box's…
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 initiate the study of online contracts, which integrate the game-theoretic considerations of economic contract theory, with the algorithmic and informational challenges of online algorithm design. Our starting point is the classic online…
The Pandora's Box problem models the search for the best alternative when evaluation is costly. In the simplest variant, a decision maker is presented with $n$ boxes, each associated with a cost of inspection and a hidden random reward. The…
The Pandora's box problem (Weitzman 1979) is a core model in economic theory that captures an agent's (Pandora's) search for the best alternative (box). We study an important generalization of the problem where the agent can either fully…
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…
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 analyze a two-period principal-agent model in which the principal faces a budget constraint, and the agent's private costs of performing tasks across the two periods may be correlated. We examine the optimal design of the reward scheme…
Algorithmic contract design studies scenarios where a principal incentivizes an agent to exert effort on her behalf. In this work, we focus on settings where the agent's type is drawn from an unknown distribution, and formalize an offline…
We analyze conditional optimization problems arising in discrete time Principal-Agent problems of delegated portfolio optimization with linear contracts. Applying tools from Conditional Analysis we show that some results known in the…
We study the optimal contract problem in the \emph{combinatorial actions} framework of D\"utting et al.~[FOCS'21], where a principal delegates a project to an agent who chooses a subset of hidden, costly actions, and the resulting reward is…
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…
This paper explores the economic interactions within modern crowdsourcing markets. In these markets, employers issue requests for tasks, platforms facilitate the recruitment of crowd workers, and workers complete tasks for monetary rewards.…
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…
A principal uses payments conditioned on stochastic outcomes of a team project to elicit costly effort from the team members. We develop a multi-agent generalization of a classic first-order approach to contract optimization by leveraging…
We study a bilevel \emph{max-max} optimization framework for principal-agent contract design, in which a principal chooses incentives to maximize utility while anticipating the agent's best response. This problem, central to moral hazard…