Related papers: Ultra Efficient Contracts: Pushing the Boundaries …
We study a bilateral trade problem where a principal has private information that is revealed with delay, such as a seller who does not yet know her production cost. Postponing the contracting process incurs a costly delay, while early…
Allocating conflicting jobs among individuals while respecting a budget constraint for each individual is an optimization problem that arises in various real-world scenarios. In this paper, we consider the situation where each individual…
We study a moral hazard problem with adverse selection: a risk-neutral agent can directly control the output distribution and possess private information about the production environment. The principal designs a menu of contracts satisfying…
Motivated by the emergence of decentralized machine learning (ML) ecosystems, we study the delegation of data collection. Taking the field of contract theory as our starting point, we design optimal and near-optimal contracts that deal with…
What type of delegation contract should be offered when facing a risk of the magnitude of the pandemic we are currently experiencing and how does the likelihood of an exogenous early termination of the relationship modify the terms of a…
In a continuous-time setting where a risk-averse agent controls the drift of an output process driven by a Brownian motion, optimal contracts are linear in the terminal output; this result is well-known in a setting with moral hazard and…
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…
We study a generic principal-agent problem in continuous time on a finite time horizon. We introduce a framework in which the agent is allowed to employ measure-valued controls and characterise the continuation utility as a solution to a…
While the success of large language models (LLMs) increases demand for machine-generated text, current pay-per-token pricing schemes create a misalignment of incentives known in economics as moral hazard: Text-generating agents have strong…
We consider a dynamic moral hazard problem between a principal and an agent, where the sole instrument the principal has to incentivize the agent is the disclosure of information. The principal aims at maximizing the (discounted) number of…
Pareto optimization via evolutionary multi-objective algorithms has been shown to efficiently solve constrained monotone submodular functions. Traditionally when solving multiple problems, the algorithm is run for each problem separately.…
A well-intentioned principal provides information to a rationally inattentive agent without internalizing the agent's cost of processing information. Whatever information the principal makes available, the agent may choose to ignore some.…
Motivated by fairness concerns, we study the `portfolio problem': given an optimization problem with set $D$ of feasible solutions, a class $\mathbf{C}$ of fairness objective functions on $D$, and an approximation factor $\alpha \ge 1$, a…
We consider an outsourcing problem where a software agent procures multiple services from providers with uncertain reliabilities to complete a computational task before a strict deadline. The service consumer requires a procurement strategy…
Motivated by a wide range of applications in data mining and machine learning, we consider the problem of maximizing a submodular function subject to supermodular cost constraints. In contrast to the well-understood setting of cardinality…
Reinforcement learning can greatly benefit from the use of options as a way of encoding recurring behaviours and to foster exploration. An important open problem is how can an agent autonomously learn useful options when solving particular…
We study an exit contract design problem, where one provides a universal exit contract to multiple heterogeneous agents, with which each agent chooses an optimal (exit) stopping time. The problem consists in optimizing the universal exit…
Maximizing a single submodular set function subject to a cardinality constraint is a well-studied and central topic in combinatorial optimization. However, finding a set that maximizes multiple functions at the same time is much less…
In settings where full incentive-compatibility is not available, such as core-constraint combinatorial auctions and budget-balanced combinatorial exchanges, we may wish to design mechanisms that are as incentive-compatible as possible. This…
This paper studies optimal Public Private Partnerships contract between a public entity and a consortium, in continuous-time and with a continuous payment, with the possibility for the public to stop the contract. The public ("she") pays a…