Related papers: When Contracts Get Complex: Information-Theoretic …
We consider a hidden-action principal-agent model, in which actions require different amounts of effort, and the agent privately knows his ability that determines his cost of effort. We show that linear contracts admit approximation…
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…
We study a bilateral trade problem where a principal has private information that is revealed with delay, such as a seller who does not yet know her production cost. Postponing the contracting process incurs a costly delay, while early…
We study a market mechanism that sets edge prices to incentivize strategic agents to efficiently share limited network capacity. In this market, agents form coalitions, with each coalition sharing a unit capacity of a selected route and…
Let $(f,P)$ be an incentive compatible mechanism where $f$ is the social choice function and $P$ is the payment function. In many important settings, $f$ uniquely determines $P$ (up to a constant) and therefore a common approach is to focus…
Financial options are contracts that specify the right to buy or sell an underlying asset at a strike price by an expiration date. Standard exchanges offer options of predetermined strike values and trade options of different strikes…
The design of revenue-maximizing combinatorial auctions, i.e. multi-item auctions over bundles of goods, is one of the most fundamental problems in computational economics, unsolved even for two bidders and two items for sale. In the…
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…
Motivated by the recent popularity of machine learning training services, we introduce a contract design problem in which a provider sells a service that results in an outcome of uncertain quality for the buyer. The seller has a set of…
Civic Crowdfunding (CC) uses the ``power of the crowd'' to garner contributions towards public projects. As these projects are non-excludable, agents may prefer to ``free-ride,'' resulting in the project not being funded. For single project…
Most of the work in the auction design literature assumes that bidders behave rationally based on the information available for every individual auction, and the revelation principle enables designers to restrict their efforts to incentive…
In mechanism design it is typical to impose incentive compatibility and then derive an optimal mechanism subject to this constraint. By replacing the incentive compatibility requirement with the goal of minimizing expected ex post regret,…
Complements between goods - where one good takes on added value in the presence of another - have been a thorn in the side of algorithmic mechanism designers. On the one hand, complements are common in the standard motivating applications…
Object queries are essential in information seeking and decision making in vast areas of applications. However, a query may involve complex conditions on objects and sets, which can be arbitrarily nested and aliased. The objects and sets…
We introduce a stochastic principal-agent model. A principal and an agent interact in a stochastic environment, each privy to observations about the state not available to the other. The principal has the power of commitment, both to elicit…
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…
We study a class of manipulations in combinatorial auctions where bidders fundamentally misrepresent what goods they are interested in. Prior work has largely assumed that bidders only submit bids on their bundles of interest, which we call…
Impartial selection problems are concerned with the selection of one or more agents from a set based on mutual nominations from within the set. To avoid strategic nominations of the agents, the axiom of impartiality requires that the…
This paper studies contracting in the presence of externalities with a non-contractible outsider. Multiple equilibria arise from strategic symmetry between the insider agent and the outsider. To address strategic uncertainty, the principal…
We study online combinatorial allocation problems in the secretary setting, under interdependent values. In the interdependent model, introduced by Milgrom and Weber (1982), each agent possesses a private signal that captures her…