Related papers: Budget-Feasible Contracts
We study the problem of a budget limited buyer who wants to buy a set of items, each from a different seller, to maximize her value. The budget feasible mechanism design problem aims to design a mechanism which incentivizes the sellers to…
In display advertising, advertisers want to achieve a marketing objective with constraints on budget and cost-per-outcome. This is usually formulated as an optimization problem that maximizes the total utility under constraints. The…
This paper studies contracting in the presence of externalities with a non-contractible outsider. Multiple equilibria arise from strategic symmetry between the insider agent and the outsider. To address strategic uncertainty, the principal…
We study revenue maximization in a buyer-seller setting where the seller has a single object and the buyer has both a private valuation and a private budget. Private budgets complicate the classic single-product monopoly problem, making…
Consider a principal who wants to search through a space of stochastic solutions for one maximizing their utility. If the principal cannot conduct this search on their own, they may instead delegate this problem to an agent with distinct…
We study a multi-agent contracting problem where agents exert costly effort to achieve individually observable binary outcomes. While the principal can theoretically extract the full social welfare using a discriminatory contract that…
We study the worst-case adaptive optimization problem with budget constraint that is useful for modeling various practical applications in artificial intelligence and machine learning. We investigate the near-optimality of greedy algorithms…
A principal must decide between two options. Which one she prefers depends on the private information of two agents. One agent always prefers the first option; the other always prefers the second. Transfers are infeasible. One application…
A new class of multi agent single machine scheduling problems is introduced, where each job is associated with a self interested agent with a utility function decreasing in completion time. We aim to achieve a fair solution by maximizing…
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…
Many scenarios where agents with restrictions compete for resources can be cast as maximum matching problems on bipartite graphs. Our focus is on resource allocation problems where agents may have restrictions that make them incompatible…
Maximizing utility with a budget constraint is the primary goal for advertisers in real-time bidding (RTB) systems. The policy maximizing the utility is referred to as the optimal bidding strategy. Earlier works on optimal bidding strategy…
We study a continuous time contracting model in which a principal hires a risk averse agent to manage a project over a finite horizon and provides sequential payments whose timing is endogenously determined. The resulting nonzero-sum…
We study a robust contract design problem with deferred inspection, in which a principal allocates a scarce resource to an agent, observes the agent's realized outcome ex post at negligible cost, and conditions transfers on this information…
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…
We explore the deliberate infusion of ambiguity into the design of contracts. We show that when the agent is ambiguity-averse and hence chooses an action that maximizes their minimum utility, the principal can strictly gain from using an…
The framework of budget-feasible mechanism design studies procurement auctions where the auctioneer (buyer) aims to maximize his valuation function subject to a hard budget constraint. We study the problem of designing truthful mechanisms…
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 two combinatorial contract design models -- multi-agent and multi-action -- where a principal delegates the execution of a costly project to others. In both settings, the principal cannot observe the choices of the agent(s), only…
We make three different types of contributions to cost-sharing: First, we identify several new classes of combinatorial cost functions that admit incentive-compatible mechanisms achieving both a constant-factor approximation of…