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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…
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…
In an online contract selection problem there is a seller which offers a set of contracts to sequentially arriving buyers whose types are drawn from an unknown distribution. If there exists a profitable contract for the buyer in the offered…
We study the hidden-action principal-agent problem in an online setting. In each round, the principal posts a contract that specifies the payment to the agent based on each outcome. The agent then makes a strategic choice of action that…
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…
The agency problem emerges in today's large scale machine learning tasks, where the learners are unable to direct content creation or enforce data collection. In this work, we propose a theoretical framework for aligning economic interests…
We consider the standard moral hazard problem with limited liability. The first-order approach (FOA) is the main tool for its solution, but existing sufficient conditions for its validity are restrictive. Our main result shows that the FOA…
Contract theory studies how a principal can incentivize agents to exert costly, unobservable effort through performance-based payments. While classical economic models provide elegant characterizations of optimal solutions, modern…
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…
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…
Robust optimization (RO) has emerged as one of the leading paradigms to efficiently model parameter uncertainty. The recent connections between RO and problems in statistics and machine learning domains demand for solving RO problems in…
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 introduce a novel model of contracts with combinatorial actions that accounts for sequential and adaptive agent behavior. As in the standard model, a principal delegates the execution of a costly project to an agent. There are $n$…
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 application of contract design in the context of sequential exploration problems. In our principal-agent setting, a search task is delegated to an agent. The agent performs a sequential exploration of $n$ boxes, suffers…
We investigate the mechanism design problem faced by a principal who hires \emph{multiple} agents to gather and report costly information. Then, the principal exploits the information to make an informed decision. We model this problem as a…
Motivated by applications where a system must remain operational via continual procurement of contracts, we study two online contract selection problems under uncertain prices. At each time step, a price drawn from a known distribution is…
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…
We study a two-period moral hazard problem; there are two agents, with action sets that are unknown to the principal. The principal contracts with each agent sequentially, and seeks to maximize the worst-case discounted sum of payoffs,…
First-price auctions have very recently swept the online advertising industry, replacing second-price auctions as the predominant auction mechanism on many platforms. This shift has brought forth important challenges for a bidder: how…