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Related papers: Sequential optimal contracting in continuous time

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This paper is concerned with the stochastic linear quadratic Stackelberg differential game with overlapping information, where the diffusion terms contain the control and state variables. Here the term "overlapping" means that there are…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2018-05-01 Jingtao Shi , Guangchen Wang , Jie Xiong

A principal uses payments conditioned on stochastic outcomes of a team project to elicit costly effort from the team members. We develop a multi-agent generalization of a classic first-order approach to contract optimization by leveraging…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-03-13 Krishna Dasaratha , Benjamin Golub , Anant Shah

We investigate an optimal reinsurance problem for an insurance company facing a constant fixed cost when the reinsurance contract is signed. The insurer needs to optimally choose both the starting time of the reinsurance contract and the…

Mathematical Finance · Quantitative Finance 2021-01-14 Matteo Brachetta , Claudia Ceci

Linear contracts are ubiquitous in practice, yet optimal contract theory often prescribes complex, nonlinear structures. We provide a distributional robustness justification for linear contracts. We study a principal-agent problem where the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Shiliang Zuo

We study hidden-action principal-agent problems with multiple agents. Unlike previous work, we consider a general setting in which each agent has an arbitrary number of actions, and the joint action induces outcomes according to an…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-02-22 Federico Cacciamani , Martino Bernasconi , Matteo Castiglioni , Nicola Gatti

The increasing deployment of AI is shaping the future landscape of the internet, which is set to become an integrated ecosystem of AI agents. Orchestrating the interaction among AI agents necessitates decentralized, self-sustaining…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-10-08 Dima Ivanov , Paul Dütting , Inbal Talgam-Cohen , Tonghan Wang , David C. Parkes

We study a generalization of the multi-armed bandit problem with multiple plays where there is a cost associated with pulling each arm and the agent has a budget at each time that dictates how much she can expect to spend. We derive an…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2019-09-13 Alexander Luedtke , Emilie Kaufmann , Antoine Chambaz

We study the optimal contract problem in the \emph{combinatorial actions} framework of D\"utting et al.~[FOCS'21], where a principal delegates a project to an agent who chooses a subset of hidden, costly actions, and the resulting reward is…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Michal Feldman , Liat Yashin

This paper characterizes differentiable subgame perfect equilibria in a continuous time intertemporal decision optimization problem with non-constant discounting. The equilibrium equation takes two different forms, one of which is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2007-05-23 Ivar Ekeland , Ali Lazrak

We are considering the problem of optimal portfolio delegation between an investor and a portfolio manager under a random default time. We focus on a novel variation of the Principal-Agent problem adapted to this framework. We address the…

Mathematical Finance · Quantitative Finance 2024-10-18 Alberto Gennaro , Thibaut Mastrolia

A principal provides nondiscriminatory incentives for independent and identical agents. The principal cannot observe the agents' actions, nor does she know the entire set of actions available to them. It is shown, very generally, that any…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2024-01-31 Ashwin Kambhampati

We consider a dynamic moral hazard problem between a principal and an agent, where the sole instrument the principal has to incentivize the agent is the disclosure of information. The principal aims at maximizing the (discounted) number of…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2021-03-09 Wei Zhao , Claudio Mezzetti , Ludovic Renou , Tristan Tomala

Motivated by models of epidemic control in large populations, we consider a Stackelberg mean field game model between a principal and a mean field of agents evolving on a finite state space. The agents play a non-cooperative game in which…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-05-26 Alexander Aurell , Rene Carmona , Gokce Dayanikli , Mathieu Lauriere

Agents rarely act in isolation -- their behavioral history, in particular, is public to others. We seek a non-asymptotic understanding of how a leader agent should shape this history to its maximal advantage, knowing that follower agent(s)…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2019-05-29 Vidya Muthukumar , Anant Sahai

We study the combinatorial contracting problem of D\"utting et al. [FOCS '21], in which a principal seeks to incentivize an agent to take a set of costly actions. In their model, there is a binary outcome (the agent can succeed or fail),…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-09-20 Paul Dütting , Michal Feldman , Yoav Gal Tzur

We introduce a new model of combinatorial contracts in which a principal delegates the execution of a costly task to an agent. To complete the task, the agent can take any subset of a given set of unobservable actions, each of which has an…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Paul Duetting , Tomer Ezra , Michal Feldman , Thomas Kesselheim

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-09-04 Jianfeng Zhang , Zimu Zhu

We introduce a general framework for continuous-time betting markets, in which a bookmaker can dynamically control the prices of bets on outcomes of random events. In turn, the prices set by the bookmaker affect the rate or intensity of…

Mathematical Finance · Quantitative Finance 2021-03-09 Matthew Lorig , Zhou Zhou , Bin Zou

We initiate the study of computing (near-)optimal contracts in succinctly representable principal-agent settings. Here optimality means maximizing the principal's expected payoff over all incentive-compatible contracts---known in economics…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2020-02-28 Paul Duetting , Tim Roughgarden , Inbal Talgam-Cohen

This paper studies a class of strongly monotone games involving non-cooperative agents that optimize their own time-varying cost functions. We assume that the agents can observe other agents' historical actions and choose actions that best…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-09-04 Zifan Wang , Yi Shen , Michael M. Zavlanos , Karl H. Johansson