Related papers: Persuading a Credible Agent
Classic mechanism/information design imposes the assumption that agents are fully rational, meaning each of them always selects the action that maximizes her expected utility. Yet many empirical evidence suggests that human decisions may…
We consider a monopoly information holder selling information to a budget-constrained decision maker, who may benefit from the seller's information. The decision maker has a utility function that depends on his action and an uncertain state…
Fraud can pose a challenge in many resource allocation domains, including social service delivery and credit provision. For example, agents may misreport private information in order to gain benefits or access to credit. To mitigate this, a…
Motivating careerists is challenging for political organizations. Without explicit contracts, careerists often pander to public opinions or their superiors' preferences. Worse, when tasked with implementing these distorted decisions, they…
In a game of persuasion with evidence, a sender has private information. By presenting evidence on the information, the sender wishes to persuade a receiver to take a single action (e.g., hire a job candidate, or convict a defendant). The…
In a multi-party machine learning system, different parties cooperate on optimizing towards better models by sharing data in a privacy-preserving way. A major challenge in learning is the incentive issue. For example, if there is…
We study the principal-agent problem with a third party that we call social planner, whose responsibility is to reconcile the conflicts of interest between the two players and induce socially optimal outcome in terms of some given social…
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…
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…
Optimal mechanism design enjoys a beautiful and well-developed theory, and also a number of killer applications. Rules of thumb produced by the field influence everything from how governments sell wireless spectrum licenses to how the major…
In this paper, we study belief elicitation about an uncertain future event, where the reports will affect a principal's decision. We study two problems that can arise in this setting: (1) Agents may have an interest in the outcome of the…
We consider settings where an uninformed principal must hear arguments from two better-informed agents, corresponding to two possible courses of action that they argue for. The arguments are verifiable in the sense that the true state of…
In principal-agent models, a principal offers a contract to an agent to perform a certain task. The agent exerts a level of effort that maximizes her utility. The principal is oblivious to the agent's chosen level of effort, and conditions…
We study hidden-action principal-agent problems in which a principal commits to an outcome-dependent payment scheme (called contract) so as to incentivize the agent to take a costly, unobservable action leading to favorable outcomes. In…
We analyze a model of selling a single object to a principal-agent pair who want to acquire the object for a firm. The principal and the agent have different assessments of the object's value to the firm. The agent is budget-constrained…
We study a principal-agent team production model. The principal hires a team of agents to participate in a common production task. The exact effort of each agent is unobservable and unverifiable, but the total production outcome (e.g. the…
A set of agents has to make a decision about the provision of a public good and its financing. Agents have heterogeneous values for the public good and each agent's value is private information. An agenda-setter has the right to make a…
Suppose a decision maker wants to predict weather tomorrow by eliciting and aggregating information from crowd. How can the decision maker incentivize the crowds to report their information truthfully? Many truthful peer prediction…
Models of economic decision makers often include idealized assumptions, such as rationality, perfect foresight, and access to all relevant pieces of information. These assumptions often assure the models' internal validity, but, at the same…
A principal designs an algorithm that generates a publicly observable prediction of a binary state. She must decide whether to act directly based on the prediction or to delegate the decision to an agent with private information but…