Related papers: Maximal Procurement under a Budget

We study the revenue maximization problem of a seller with n heterogeneous items for sale to a single buyer whose valuation function for sets of items is unknown and drawn from some distribution D. We show that if D is a distribution over…

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…

The optimal pricing problem is a fundamental problem that arises in combinatorial auctions. Suppose that there is one seller who has indivisible items and multiple buyers who want to purchase a combination of the items. The seller wants to…

We study revenue maximization in settings where agents' values are interdependent: each agent receives a signal drawn from a correlated distribution and agents' values are functions of all of the signals. We introduce a variant of the…

We consider an agent who has access to a financial market, including derivative contracts, who looks to maximise her utility. Whilst the agent looks to maximise utility over one probability measure, or class of probability measures, she…

Many scenarios where agents with restrictions compete for resources can be cast as maximum matching problems on bipartite graphs. Our focus is on resource allocation problems where agents may have restrictions that make them incompatible…

Incentives are more likely to elicit desired outcomes when they are designed based on accurate models of agents' strategic behavior. A growing literature, however, suggests that people do not quite behave like standard economic agents in a…

We study procurement design when the buyer is uncertain about both the value of the good and the seller's cost. The buyer has a conjectured model but does not fully trust it. She first identifies mechanisms that maximize her worst-case…

In this paper, we study influence maximization in the voter model in the presence of biased voters (or zealots) on complex networks. Under what conditions should an external controller with finite budget who aims at maximizing its influence…

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…

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…

In the classical principal-agent hidden-action contract model, a principal delegates the execution of a costly task to an agent. In order to complete the task, the agent chooses an action from a set of actions, where each potential action…

A monopolist offers personalized prices to consumers with unit demand, heterogeneous values, and idiosyncratic costs, who differ in a protected characteristic, such as race or gender. The seller is subject to a non-discrimination…

We study a large economy in which firms cannot compute exact solutions to the non-linear equations that characterize the equilibrium price at which they can sell future output. Instead, firms use polynomial expansions to approximate prices.…

In this paper, we consider a general distributed system with multiple agents who select and then implement actions in the system. The system has an operator with a centralized objective. The agents, on the other hand, are selfinterested and…

We study non-monetary mechanisms for the fair and efficient allocation of reusable public resources, i.e., resources used for varying durations. We consider settings where a limited resource is repeatedly shared among a set of agents, each…

We consider the problem of a revenue-maximizing seller with m items for sale to n additive bidders with hard budget constraints, assuming that the seller has some prior distribution over bidder values and budgets. The prior may be…

Intrinsic motivations are receiving increasing attention, i.e. behavioral incentives that are not engineered, but emerge from the interaction of an agent with its surroundings. In this work we study the emergence of behaviors driven by one…

We model endogenous perception of private information in single-agent screening problems, with potential evaluation errors. The agent's evaluation of their type depends on their cognitive state: either attentive (i.e., they correctly…

A principal must allocate a set of heterogeneous tasks (or objects) among multiple agents. The principal has preferences over the allocation. Each agent has preferences over which tasks they are assigned, which are their private…