Related papers: Contract Design Under Approximate Best Responses
This paper considers the hidden-action model of the principal-agent problem, in which a principal incentivizes an agent to work on a project using a contract. We investigate whether contracts with bounded payments are learnable and…
We study principal-agent problems in which a principal commits to an outcome-dependent payment scheme -- called contract -- in order to induce an agent to take a costly, unobservable action leading to favorable outcomes. We consider a…
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 consider the principal-agent problem with heterogeneous agents. Previous works assume that the principal signs independent incentive contracts with every agent to make them invest more efforts on the tasks. However, in many…
We introduce a novel model of contracts with combinatorial actions that accounts for sequential and adaptive agent behavior. As in the standard model, a principal delegates the execution of a costly project to an agent. There are $n$…
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…
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…
We study hidden-action principal-agent problems with multiple agents. These are problems in which a principal commits to an outcome-dependent payment scheme in order to incentivize some agents to take costly, unobservable actions that lead…
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…
We study a general class of Principal-Agent problems in continuous time under hidden action. By formulating the model as a coupled stochastic optimal control problem we are able to find a set of necessary conditions characterizing optimal…
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…
The problem of computing near-optimal contracts in combinatorial settings has recently attracted significant interest in the computer science community. Previous work has provided a rich body of structural and algorithmic insights into this…
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…
In this paper we study a principal-agent problem in continuous time with multiple lump-sum payments (contracts) paid at different deterministic times. We reduce the non-zero sum Stackelberg game between the principal and agent to a standard…
We study principal-agent problems where a farsighted agent takes costly actions in an MDP. The core challenge in these settings is that agent's actions are hidden to the principal, who can only observe their outcomes, namely state…
We introduce and study a computational version of the principal-agent problem -- a classic problem in Economics that arises when a principal desires to contract an agent to carry out some task, but has incomplete information about the agent…
Principal-agent problems arise when one party acts on behalf of another, leading to conflicts of interest. The economic literature has extensively studied principal-agent problems, and recent work has extended this to more complex scenarios…
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…
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…
In this paper, we consider a problem of contract theory in which several Principals hire a common Agent and we study the model in the continuous time setting. We show that optimal contracts should satisfy some equilibrium conditions and we…