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An agent chooses an action based on her private information and a recommendation from an informed but potentially misaligned adviser. With a known probability, the adviser truthfully reports his signal; with the remaining probability, he…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-03-20 Piotr Dworczak , Alex Smolin

We study the robust sequential screening problem of a monopolist seller of multiple cloud computing services facing a buyer who has private information about his demand distribution for these services. At the time of contracting, the buyer…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-02-12 Dirk Bergemann , Rahul Deb

How does competition in markets for information affect the creation and division of surplus? We study this question in a search environment in which an agent searches sequentially for a high-quality good and learns about the quality of…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-05-26 Teddy Mekonnen , Bobak Pakzad-Hurson

We study the design of information acquisition games-environments where a designer contracts their action on Sender's choice of experiment and the realized signals about some state-and identify which predictions can be made absent knowledge…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-01-22 Eric Gao , Daniel Luo

I analyze long-term contracting in insurance markets with asymmetric information. The buyer privately observes her risk type, which evolves stochastically over time. A long-term contract specifies a menu of insurance policies, contingent on…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2022-09-01 Vitor Farinha Luz

We consider the design of experiments to evaluate treatments that are administered by self-interested agents, each seeking to achieve the highest evaluation and win the experiment. For example, in an advertising experiment, a company wishes…

Methodology · Statistics 2015-09-18 Panos Toulis , David C. Parkes , Elery Pfeffer , James Zou

Designing robust reinforcement learning (RL) agents in the presence of imperfect reward signals remains a core challenge. In practice, agents are often trained with proxy rewards that only approximate the true objective, leaving them…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-04-15 Zixuan Liu , Xiaolin Sun , Zizhan Zheng

This paper studies how uncertainty about problem difficulty shapes problem-solving strategies. I develop a dynamic model where an agent solves a problem by brainstorming approaches of unknown quality and allocating a fixed effort budget…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-04-02 Nicholas Wu

We consider a seller who offers services to a buyer with multi-unit demand. Prior to the realization of demand, the buyer receives a noisy signal of their future demand, and the seller can design contracts based on the reported value of…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-02-13 Dirk Bergemann , Michael C. Wang

We consider a moral hazard problem with multiple principals in a continuous-time model. The agent can only work exclusively for one principal at a given time, so faces an optimal switching problem. Using a randomized formulation, we manage…

Probability · Mathematics 2022-09-14 Kaitong Hu , Zhenjie Ren , Junjian Yang

Following the risk-taking model of Seel and Strack, $n$ players decide when to stop privately observed Brownian motions with drift and absorption at zero. They are then ranked according to their level of stopping and paid a rank-dependent…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-11-09 Marcel Nutz , Yuchong Zhang

The problem of reward design examines the interaction between a leader and a follower, where the leader aims to shape the follower's behavior to maximize the leader's payoff by modifying the follower's reward function. Current approaches to…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-06-10 Shuo Wu , Haoxiang Ma , Jie Fu , Shuo Han

We study the combinatorial contract design problem, introduced and studied by Dutting et. al. (2021, 2022), in both the single and multi-agent settings. Prior work has examined the problem when the principal's utility function is submodular…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-08-16 Ramiro Deo-Campo Vuong , Shaddin Dughmi , Neel Patel , Aditya Prasad

A principal wishes to transact business with a multidimensional distribution of agents whose preferences are known only in the aggregate. Assuming a twist (= generalized Spence-Mirrlees single-crossing) hypothesis and that agents can choose…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2009-12-17 Alessio Figalli , Young-Heon Kim , Robert J. McCann

A principal delegates a project to a team $S$ from a pool of $n$ agents. The project's value if all agents in $S$ exert costly effort is $f(S)$. To incentivize the agents to participate, the principal assigns each agent $i\in S$ a share…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-04-29 Gil Aharoni , Martin Hoefer , Inbal Talgam-Cohen

In this work, we introduce and study contextual search in general principal-agent games, where a principal repeatedly interacts with agents by offering contracts based on contextual information and historical feedback, without knowing the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-10-22 Yiding Feng , Mengfan Ma , Bo Peng , Zongqi Wan

A principal must allocate a set of heterogeneous tasks (or objects) among multiple agents. The principal has preferences over the allocation. Each agent has preferences over which tasks they are assigned, which are their private…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-01-29 Quitzé Valenzuela-Stookey

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…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2022-05-24 Deniz Kattwinkel , Axel Niemeyer , Justus Preusser , Alexander Winter

Crowdsourcing markets have emerged as a popular platform for matching available workers with tasks to complete. The payment for a particular task is typically set by the task's requester, and may be adjusted based on the quality of the…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2015-09-03 Chien-Ju Ho , Aleksandrs Slivkins , Jennifer Wortman Vaughan

This paper proposes a novel continuous-time dynamic contract framework that has a risk-limiting capability. If a principal and an agent enter into such a contract, the principal can optimally manage its performance and risk with a guarantee…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2014-10-10 Insoon Yang , Duncan S. Callaway , Claire J. Tomlin