Related papers: Designing Exploration Contracts
Weitzman (1979) introduced the Pandora Box problem as a model for sequential search with inspection costs, and gave an elegant index-based policy that attains provably optimal expected payoff. In various scenarios, the searching agent may…
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…
We study the consequences of information asymmetries and misaligned incentives in settings with multiple independent agents. We model an interaction between a Sender, who holds vital private information but cannot act, and a Receiver, who…
In this paper we consider a principal agent problem where the agent is allowed to quit, by incurring a cost. When the current agent quits the job, the principal will hire a new one, possibly with a different type. We characterize the…
This paper studies the design of optimal proper scoring rules when the principal has partial knowledge of an agent's signal distribution. Recent work characterizes the proper scoring rules that maximize the increase of an agent's payoff…
What type of delegation contract should be offered when facing a risk of the magnitude of the pandemic we are currently experiencing and how does the likelihood of an exogenous early termination of the relationship modify the terms of a…
We study the design of contracts that incentivize a researcher to conduct a costly experiment, extending the work of Yoder (2022) from binary states to a general state space. The cost is private information of the researcher. When the…
We study the combinatorial contract design problem, introduced and studied by Dutting et. al. (2021, 2022), in both the single and multi-agent settings. Prior work has examined the problem when the principal's utility function is submodular…
In the online (time-series) search problem, a player is presented with a sequence of prices which are revealed in an online manner. In the standard definition of the problem, for each revealed price, the player must decide irrevocably…
A principal and an agent face symmetric uncertainty about the value of two correlated projects for the agent. The principal chooses which project values to publicly discover and makes a proposal to the agent, who accepts if and only if the…
I analyze long-term contracting in insurance markets with asymmetric information. The buyer privately observes her risk type, which evolves stochastically over time. A long-term contract specifies a menu of insurance policies, contingent on…
Recent technology advances have enabled firms to flexibly process and analyze sophisticated employee performance data at a reduced and yet significant cost. We develop a theory of optimal incentive contracting where the monitoring…
We introduce a dynamic mechanism design problem in which the designer wants to offer for sale an item to an agent, and another item to the same agent at some point in the future. The agent's joint distribution of valuations for the two…
Ranking is fundamental to many areas, such as search engine optimization, human feedback for language models, as well as peer grading. Crowdsourcing, which is often used for these tasks, requires proper incentivization to ensure accurate…
Two central problems in Stochastic Optimization are Min Sum Set Cover and Pandora's Box. In Pandora's Box, we are presented with $n$ boxes, each containing an unknown value and the goal is to open the boxes in some order to minimize the sum…
In this paper, we initiate the computational problem of jointly designing information and contracts. We consider three possible classes of contracts with decreasing flexibility and increasing simplicity: ambiguous contracts, menus of…
There are many settings in which a principal performs a task by delegating it to an agent, who searches over possible solutions and proposes one to the principal. This describes many aspects of the workflow within organizations, as well as…
We characterize the optimal reward functions (scoring rules) that incentivize an agent to acquire information and report it truthfully to the principal. The optimal scoring rules let the agent make a simple binary bet in single-dimensional…
Fairness is desirable yet challenging to achieve within multi-agent systems, especially when agents differ in latent traits that affect their abilities. This hidden heterogeneity often leads to unequal distributions of wealth, even when…
Economic theory distinguishes between principal-agent settings in which the agent has a private type and settings in which the agent takes a hidden action. Many practical problems, however, involve aspects of both. For example, brand X may…