Related papers: Delegation with Costly Inspection
In delegation problems, a principal does not have the resources necessary to complete a particular task, so they delegate the task to an untrusted agent whose interests may differ from their own. Given any family of such problems and space…
In a delegation problem, a principal P with commitment power tries to pick one out of $n$ options. Each option is drawn independently from a known distribution. Instead of inspecting the options herself, P delegates the information…
Delegation covers a broad class of problems in which a principal doesn't have the resources or expertise necessary to complete a task by themselves, so they delegate the task to an agent whose interests may not be aligned with their own.…
This paper studies delegation in a model of discrete choice. In the delegation problem, an uninformed principal must consult an informed agent to make a decision. Both the agent and principal have preferences over the decided-upon action…
We consider search problems with nonobligatory inspection and single-item or combinatorial selection. A decision maker is presented with a number of items, each of which contains an unknown price, and can pay an inspection cost to observe…
There are many settings in which a principal performs a task by delegating it to an agent, who searches over possible solutions and proposes one to the principal. This describes many aspects of the workflow within organizations, as well as…
Weitzman introduced Pandora's box problem as a mathematical model of sequential search with inspection costs, in which a searcher is allowed to select a prize from one of $n$ alternatives. Several decades later, Doval introduced a close…
We consider a multi-agent delegation mechanism without money. In our model, given a set of agents, each agent has a fixed number of solutions which is exogenous to the mechanism, and privately sends a signal, e.g., a subset of solutions, to…
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 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…
We present a study on a repeated delegated choice problem, which is the first to consider an online learning variant of Kleinberg and Kleinberg, EC'18. In this model, a principal interacts repeatedly with an agent who possesses an exogenous…
Decision-makers in high-stakes selection processes often face a fundamental choice: whether to make decisions themselves or to delegate authority to another entity whose incentives may only be partially aligned with their own. Such…
A principal delegates decisions to a biased agent. Payoffs depend on a state that the principal cannot observe. Initially, the agent does not observe the state, but he can acquire information about it at a cost. We characterize the…
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…
We consider a principal who wishes to screen an agent with \emph{discrete} types by offering a menu of \emph{discrete} quantities and \emph{discrete} transfers. We assume that the principal's valuation is discrete strictly concave and use a…
We study the role of regulatory inspections in a contract design problem in which a principal interacts separately with multiple agents. Each agent's hidden action includes a dimension that determines whether they undertake an extra costly…
We examine an approval-based model of Liquid Democracy with a budget constraint on voting and delegating costs, aiming to centrally select casting voters ensuring complete representation of the electorate. From a computational complexity…
We study the joint minimization of communication and computation costs in distributed computing, where a master node coordinates $N$ workers to evaluate a function over a library of $n$ files. Assuming that the function is decomposed into…
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…
Martin Weitzman's "Pandora's problem" furnishes the mathematical basis for optimal search theory in economics. Nearly 40 years later, Laura Doval introduced a version of the problem in which the searcher is not obligated to pay the cost of…