Related papers: Algorithmic Contract Theory: A Survey
Combinatorial contracts are emerging as a key paradigm in algorithmic contract design, paralleling the role of combinatorial auctions in algorithmic mechanism design. In this paper we study natural combinatorial contract settings involving…
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…
We study a new class of contract design problems where a principal delegates the execution of multiple projects to a set of agents. The principal's expected reward from each project is a combinatorial function of the agents working on it.…
We study the classic principal-agent model when the signal observed by the principal is chosen by the agent. We fully characterize the optimal information structure from an agent's perspective in a general moral hazard setting with limited…
Contracts are a well-established approach for describing and analyzing behavioral aspects of web service compositions. The theory of contracts comes equipped with a notion of compatibility between clients and servers that ensures that every…
We investigate the problem of a principal looking to contract an expert to provide a probability forecast for a categorical event. We assume all experts have a common public prior on the event's probability, but can form more accurate…
Consider costly and time-consuming tasks that add up to the success of a project, and must be fitted into a given time-frame. This is an instance of the classic budgeted maximization (knapsack) problem, which admits an FPTAS. Now assume an…
Contract scheduling is a general technique that allows to design a system with interruptible capabilities, given an algorithm that is not necessarily interruptible. Previous work on this topic has largely assumed that the interruption is a…
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…
Recent technology advances have enabled firms to flexibly process and analyze sophisticated employee performance data at a reduced and yet significant cost. We develop a theory of optimal incentive contracting where the monitoring…
What are the necessary and sufficient conditions for a proposition to be called a requirement? In Requirements Engineering research, a proposition is a requirement if and only if specific grammatical and/or communication conditions hold. I…
We study principal-agent problems in which a principal commits to an outcome-dependent payment scheme (a.k.a. contract) so as to induce an agent to take a costly, unobservable action. We relax the assumption that the principal perfectly…
Algocracy is the rule by algorithms. This paper summarises technologies useful to create algocratic social machines and presents idealistic examples of their application. In particular, it describes smart contracts and their…
A principal selects a team of agents for collaborating on a joint project. The principal aims to design a revenue-optimal contract that incentivize the team of agents to exert costly effort while satisfying fairness constraints. We show…
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 study a natural combinatorial single-principal multi-agent contract design problem, in which a principal motivates a team of agents to exert effort toward a given task. At the heart of our model is a reward function, which maps the agent…
We consider moral hazard problems where a principal has access to rich monitoring data about an agent's action. Rather than focusing on optimal contracts (which are known to in general be complicated), we characterize the optimal rate at…
A platform commits to a search algorithm that maps prices to search order. Given this algorithm, sellers set prices, and consumers engage in sequential search. This framework generalizes the ordered search literature. We introduce a special…
We study the robust regulation of contracts in moral hazard problems. A firm offers a contract to incentivise a worker protected by limited liability. A regulator restricts the set of permissible contracts to (i) improve efficiency and (ii)…
Modern engineering systems include many components of different types and functions. Verifying that these systems satisfy given specifications can be an arduous task, as most formal verification methods are limited to systems of moderate…