Related papers: Ultra Efficient Contracts: Pushing the Boundaries …
This paper derives polynomial-time approximation schemes for several NP-hard stochastic optimization problems from the algorithmic mechanism design and operations research literatures. The problems we consider involve a principal or seller…
We study the consideration of fairness in redundant assignment for multi-agent task allocation. It has recently been shown that redundant assignment of agents to tasks provides robustness to uncertainty in task performance. However, the…
Recent technology advances have enabled firms to flexibly process and analyze sophisticated employee performance data at a reduced and yet significant cost. We develop a theory of optimal incentive contracting where the monitoring…
We study reward design strategies for incentivizing a reinforcement learning agent to adopt a policy from a set of admissible policies. The goal of the reward designer is to modify the underlying reward function cost-efficiently while…
We study a bilevel \emph{max-max} optimization framework for principal-agent contract design, in which a principal chooses incentives to maximize utility while anticipating the agent's best response. This problem, central to moral hazard…
In mechanism design it is typical to impose incentive compatibility and then derive an optimal mechanism subject to this constraint. By replacing the incentive compatibility requirement with the goal of minimizing expected ex post regret,…
We study the hidden-action principal-agent problem in an online setting. In each round, the principal posts a contract that specifies the payment to the agent based on each outcome. The agent then makes a strategic choice of action that…
We develop value iteration-based algorithms to solve in a unified manner different classes of combinatorial zero-sum games with mean-payoff type rewards. These algorithms rely on an oracle, evaluating the dynamic programming operator up to…
In this paper we formulate a contract design problem where a primary license holder wishes to profit from its excess spectrum capacity by selling it to potential secondary users/buyers. It needs to determine how to optimally price the…
We design an optimal contract between a demand response aggregator (DRA) and a customer for incentive-based demand response. We consider a setting in which the customer is asked to reduce her consumption by the DRA and she is compensated…
In this paper, we study the optimal stopping problem in the so-called exploratory framework, in which the agent takes actions randomly conditioning on current state and an entropy-regularized term is added to the reward functional. Such a…
We study the power of menus of contracts in principal-agent problems with adverse selection (agents can be one of several types) and moral hazard (we cannot observe agent actions directly). For principal-agent problems with $T$ types and…
Robot allocation plays an essential role in facilitating robotic service provision across various domains. Yet the increasing number of users and the uncertainties regarding the users' true service requirements have posed challenges for the…
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…
This paper focuses on the coordination of a large population of dynamic agents with private information over multiple periods. Each agent maximizes the individual utility, while the coordinator determines the market rule to achieve group…
We study the problem of designing an optimal sequence of incentives that a principal should offer to an agent so that the agent's optimal behavior under the incentives realizes the principal's objective expressed as a temporal logic…
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…
Economic theory distinguishes between principal-agent settings in which the agent has a private type and settings in which the agent takes a hidden action. Many practical problems, however, involve aspects of both. For example, brand X may…
Dynamic contracts with multiple agents is a classical decentralized decision-making problem with asymmetric information. In this paper, we extend the single-agent dynamic incentive contract model in continuous-time to a multi-agent scheme…
We study multi-agent contracts, in which a principal delegates a task to multiple agents and incentivizes them to exert effort. Prior research has mostly focused on maximizing the principal's utility, often resulting in highly disparate…