Related papers: Contracting with a Mechanism Designer
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…
In a crowdsourcing contest, a principal holding a task posts it to a crowd. People in the crowd then compete with each other to win the rewards. Although in real life, a crowd is usually networked and people influence each other via social…
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…
A principal uses payments conditioned on stochastic outcomes of a team project to elicit costly effort from the team members. We develop a multi-agent generalization of a classic first-order approach to contract optimization by leveraging…
We study a market mechanism that sets edge prices to incentivize strategic agents to efficiently share limited network capacity. In this market, agents form coalitions, with each coalition sharing a unit capacity of a selected route and…
We study the optimal mechanism design problem faced by a market intermediary who makes revenue by connecting buyers and sellers. We first show that the optimal intermediation protocol has substantial structure: it is the solution to an…
In this paper we study a principal-agent problem in continuous time with multiple lump-sum payments (contracts) paid at different deterministic times. We reduce the non-zero sum Stackelberg game between the principal and agent to a standard…
This paper studies contracting in the presence of externalities with a non-contractible outsider. Multiple equilibria arise from strategic symmetry between the insider agent and the outsider. To address strategic uncertainty, the principal…
Crowdsourcing is a form of "peer production" in which work traditionally performed by an employee is outsourced to an "undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call." We present a model of workers supplying labor to…
This paper studies one emerging procurement auction scenario where the market is constructed over the social networks. In a social network composed of many agents, smartphones or computers, one requester releases her requirement for goods…
Exchange markets are a significant type of market economy, in which each agent holds a budget and certain (divisible) resources available for trading. Most research on equilibrium in exchange economies is based on an environment of…
We study the principal-agent problem with a third party that we call social planner, whose responsibility is to reconcile the conflicts of interest between the two players and induce socially optimal outcome in terms of some given social…
In a framework close to the one developed by Holmstr\"om and Milgrom [44], we study the optimal contracting scheme between a Principal and several Agents. Each hired Agent is in charge of one project, and can make efforts towards managing…
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…
Crowdsourcing websites (e.g. Yahoo! Answers, Amazon Mechanical Turk, and etc.) emerged in recent years that allow requesters from all around the world to post tasks and seek help from an equally global pool of workers. However, intrinsic…
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…
Collusion in market pricing is a concept associated with human actions to raise market prices through artificially limited supply. Recently, the idea of algorithmic collusion was put forward, where the human action in the pricing process is…
Collaborative machine learning (CML) provides a promising paradigm for democratizing advanced technologies by enabling cost-sharing among participants. However, the potential for rent-seeking behaviors among parties can undermine such…
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…
In the conventional principal-agent problem, a principal delegates a task to an agent and formulates a contract to incentivize the agent's actions on behalf of the principal. However, this framework overlooks the information that is…