English
Related papers

Related papers: Contracting with a Mechanism Designer

200 papers

In the combinatorial-action contract model (D\"utting et al., FOCS'21) a principal delegates the execution of a complex project to an agent, who can choose any subset from a given set of actions. Each set of actions incurs a cost to the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-11-27 Paul Dütting , Michal Feldman , Yoav Gal-Tzur , Aviad Rubinstein

We investigate the problem of heterogeneous task assignment in crowdsourcing markets from the point of view of the requester, who has a collection of tasks. Workers arrive online one by one, and each declare a set of feasible tasks they can…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2015-08-17 Sepehr Assadi , Justin Hsu , Shahin Jabbari

In a situation of moral hazard, this paper investigates the problem of Principal with $n$ Agents when the number of Agents $n$ goes to infinity. There is competition between the Agents expressed by the fact that they optimize their utility…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2023-09-06 Mao Fabrice Djete

Motivated by the problem of market power in electricity markets, we introduced in previous works a mechanism for simplified markets of two agents with linear cost. In standard procurement auctions, the market power resulting from the…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2019-07-25 Benjamin Heymann , Alejandro Jofré

Although freelancing work has grown substantially in recent years, in part facilitated by a number of online labor marketplaces, (e.g., Guru, Freelancer, Amazon Mechanical Turk), traditional forms of "in-sourcing" work continue being the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-02-19 Aris Anagnostopoulos , Carlos Castillo , Adriano Fazzone , Stefano Leonardi , Evimaria Terzi

We investigate market forces that would lead to the emergence of new classes of players in the sponsored search market. We report a 3-fold diversification triggered by two inherent features of the sponsored search market, namely, capacity…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2007-11-05 Sudhir Kumar Singh , Vwani P. Roychowdhury , Himawan Gunadhi , Behnam A. Rezaei

We study a continuous time contracting model in which a principal hires a risk averse agent to manage a project over a finite horizon and provides sequential payments whose timing is endogenously determined. The resulting nonzero-sum…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-12-01 Guillermo Alonso Alvarez , Ibrahim Ekren , Liwei Huang

Although both data availability and the demand for accurate forecasts are increasing, collaboration between stakeholders is often constrained by data ownership and competitive interests. In contrast to recent proposals within cooperative…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-14 Michael Vitali , Pierre Pinson

We study hidden-action principal-agent problems with multiple agents. These are problems in which a principal commits to an outcome-dependent payment scheme in order to incentivize some agents to take costly, unobservable actions that lead…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-02-01 Matteo Castiglioni , Alberto Marchesi , Nicola Gatti

Modern online platforms such as marketplaces, ride-hailing services, and food-delivery systems serve a dual role: they are both markets where participants interact and transact, and operators that design and govern how these markets…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-05-11 Gary Qiurui Ma

Principal-agent problems model scenarios where a principal incentivizes an agent to take costly, unobservable actions through the provision of payments. Such problems are ubiquitous in several real-world applications, ranging from…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-02-27 Francesco Bacchiocchi , Jiarui Gan , Matteo Castiglioni , Alberto Marchesi , Nicola Gatti

Combinatorial Auctions are a central problem in Algorithmic Mechanism Design: pricing and allocating goods to buyers with complex preferences in order to maximize some desired objective (e.g., social welfare, revenue, or profit). The…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2015-03-19 Avrim Blum , Anupam Gupta , Yishay Mansour , Ankit Sharma

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…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Shiliang Zuo

We investigate the mechanism design problem faced by a principal who hires \emph{multiple} agents to gather and report costly information. Then, the principal exploits the information to make an informed decision. We model this problem as a…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-07-13 Federico Cacciamani , Matteo Castiglioni , Nicola Gatti

This paper explores the capacity of artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to autonomously design incentive-compatible contracts in dual-principal-agent settings, a relatively unexplored aspect of algorithmic mechanism design. We develop a…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-06-14 Qian Qi

Crowdsourcing has become an important tool to collect data for various artificial intelligence applications and auction can be an effective way to allocate work and determine reward in a crowdsourcing platform. In this paper, we focus on…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-02-22 Timothy Shin Heng Mak , Albert Y. S. Lam

We study a multi-agent contract design problem with moral hazard. In our model, each agent exerts costly effort towards an individual task at which it may either succeed or fail, and the principal, who wishes to encourage effort, has an…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-07-09 Sumit Goel , Wade Hann-Caruthers

We study decentralized markets with the presence of middlemen, modeled by a non-cooperative bargaining game in trading networks. Our goal is to investigate how the network structure of the market and the role of middlemen influence the…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2013-07-09 Thanh Nguyen , Vijay G. Subramanian , Randall A. Berry

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…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-08-18 Matteo Castiglioni , Alberto Marchesi , Nicola Gatti

The problem of computing near-optimal contracts in combinatorial settings has recently attracted significant interest in the computer science community. Previous work has provided a rich body of structural and algorithmic insights into this…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-06-26 Michal Feldman , Yoav Gal-Tzur , Tomasz Ponitka , Maya Schlesinger