Related papers: Ultra Efficient Contracts: Pushing the Boundaries …
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 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 study optimal contract design for large populations of heterogeneous agents whose actions generate network spillovers represented by an interaction function. In a linear-quadratic framework, we solve the finite-agent problem and its…
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…
A contract is an economic tool used by a principal to incentivize one or more agents to exert effort on her behalf, by defining payments based on observable performance measures. A key challenge addressed by contracts -- known in economics…
We consider the robust contract design problem when the principal only has limited information about the actions the agent can take. The principal evaluates a contract according to its worst-case performance caused by the uncertain action…
We introduce and study the problem of designing optimal contracts under fairness constraints on the task assignments and compensations. We adopt the notion of envy-free (EF) and its relaxations, $\epsilon$-EF and envy-free up to one item…
A principal contracts with an agent who sequentially searches over projects to generate a prize. The principal initially knows only one of the agent's available projects and evaluates a contract by its worst-case performance. We…
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…
This paper proposes a method to design an optimal dynamic contract between a principal and an agent, who has the authority to control both the principal's revenue and an engineered system. The key characteristic of our problem setting is…
Consider costly and time-consuming tasks that add up to the success of a project, and must be fitted into a given time-frame. This is an instance of the classic budgeted maximization (knapsack) problem, which admits an FPTAS. Now assume an…
Real-world contracts are often ambiguous. While recent work by D\"utting, Feldman, Peretz, and Samuelson (EC 2023, Econometrica 2024) demonstrates that ambiguous contracts can yield large gains for the principal, their optimal solutions…
We study principal-agent problems in which a principal commits to an outcome-dependent payment scheme (a.k.a. contract) so as to induce an agent to take a costly, unobservable action. We relax the assumption that the principal perfectly…
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…
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…
Task allocation is a crucial process in modern systems, but it is often challenged by incomplete information about the utilities of participating agents. In this paper, we propose a new profit maximization mechanism for the task allocation…
Linear contracts are ubiquitous in practice, yet optimal contract theory often prescribes complex, nonlinear structures. We provide a distributional robustness justification for linear contracts. We study a principal-agent problem where the…
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…
Many researchers in artificial intelligence are beginning to explore the use of soft constraints to express a set of (possibly conflicting) problem requirements. A soft constraint is a function defined on a collection of variables which…
In this paper, we initiate the computational problem of jointly designing information and contracts. We consider three possible classes of contracts with decreasing flexibility and increasing simplicity: ambiguous contracts, menus of…