Related papers: When Should a Principal Delegate to an Agent in Se…

A screening instrument is costly if it is socially wasteful and productive otherwise. A principal screens an agent with multidimensional private information and quasilinear preferences that are additively separable across two components: a…

The emergent behavior of a distributed system is conditioned by the information available to the local decision-makers. Therefore, one may expect that providing decision-makers with more information will improve system performance; in this…

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…

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…

We study a ubiquitous learning challenge in online principal-agent problems during which the principal learns the agent's private information from the agent's revealed preferences in historical interactions. This paradigm includes important…

We study delegated Bayesian persuasion: a principal incentivizes an intermediary to design information via outcome-contingent transfers, while the intermediary privately chooses the experiment subject to convex costs. We characterize…

In many machine learning applications, there are multiple decision-makers involved, both automated and human. The interaction between these agents often goes unaddressed in algorithmic development. In this work, we explore a simple version…

In applications such as participatory sensing and crowd sensing, self-interested agents exert costly effort towards achieving an objective for the system operator. We study such a setup where a principal incentivizes multiple agents of…

This paper studies a dynamic screening model in which a principal hires an agent with limited liability. The agent's private cost of working is an i.i.d. draw from a continuous distribution. His working status is publicly observable. The…

AI agents are increasingly transacting on behalf of users -- delegating tasks, spending budgets, and negotiating with unfamiliar counterparties. Unlike human marketplaces, which operate under institutional designs refined over centuries,…

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…

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…

The transfer of tasks with sometimes far-reaching moral implications to autonomous systems raises a number of ethical questions. In addition to fundamental questions about the moral agency of these systems, behavioral issues arise. This…

This paper explores the economic interactions within modern crowdsourcing markets. In these markets, employers issue requests for tasks, platforms facilitate the recruitment of crowd workers, and workers complete tasks for monetary rewards.…

In the classical principal-agent problem, a principal must design a contract to incentivize an agent to perform an action on behalf of the principal. We study the classical principal-agent problem in a setting where the agent can be of one…

A collective of identical agents in a multi-agent system often works together towards the common goal. In situations where no supervisor agents are present to make decisions for the group, these agents must achieve some consensus via…

Environments with fixed adjustment costs such as transaction costs or \lq menu costs\rq$ $ are widespread within economic systems. The presence of fixed minimal adjustment costs produces adjustment stickiness so that agents must choose a…

How to optimally persuade an agent who has a private type? When elicitation is feasible, this amounts to a fairly standard principal-agent-style mechanism design problem, where the persuader employs a mechanism to first elicit the agent's…

In the information overload regime, human communication tasks such as responding to email are well-modeled as priority queues, where priority is determined by a mix of intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation corresponding to the…

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…