Related papers: Contracting with a Mechanism Designer
In applications such as participatory sensing and crowd sensing, self-interested agents exert costly effort towards achieving an objective for the system operator. We study such a setup where a principal incentivizes multiple agents of…
We study the classic principal-agent model when the signal observed by the principal is chosen by the agent. We fully characterize the optimal information structure from an agent's perspective in a general moral hazard setting with limited…
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…
Combinatorial contracts are emerging as a key paradigm in algorithmic contract design, paralleling the role of combinatorial auctions in algorithmic mechanism design. In this paper we study natural combinatorial contract settings involving…
We propose a pseudo-market solution to resource allocation problems subject to constraints. Our treatment of constraints is general: including bihierarchical constraints due to considerations of diversity in school choice, or scheduling in…
We study a new class of contract design problems where a principal delegates the execution of multiple projects to a set of agents. The principal's expected reward from each project is a combinatorial function of the agents working on it.…
Principal agent games are a growing area of research which focuses on the optimal behaviour of a principal and an agent, with the former contracting work from the latter, in return for providing a monetary award. While this field…
This paper considers the hidden-action model of the principal-agent problem, in which a principal incentivizes an agent to work on a project using a contract. We investigate whether contracts with bounded payments are learnable and…
We study the role of regulatory inspections in a contract design problem in which a principal interacts separately with multiple agents. Each agent's hidden action includes a dimension that determines whether they undertake an extra costly…
We study a natural combinatorial single-principal multi-agent contract design problem, in which a principal motivates a team of agents to exert effort toward a given task. At the heart of our model is a reward function, which maps the agent…
We study the mechanism design problem of selling $k$ items to unit-demand buyers with private valuations for the items. A buyer either participates directly in the auction or is represented by an intermediary, who represents a subset of…
We propose a decentralized market model in which agents can negotiate bilateral contracts. This builds on a similar, but centralized, model of trading networks introduced by Hatfield et al. in 2013. Prior work has established that…
There are several aspects of data markets that distinguish them from a typical commodity market: asymmetric information, the non-rivalrous nature of data, and informational externalities. Formally, this gives rise to a new class of games…
We consider a double-auction mechanism, which was recently proposed in the context of rate allocation in mobile data-offloading markets. Network operators (users) derive benefit from offloading their traffic to third party WiFi or femtocell…
Recently, some transportation service providers attempt to integrate the ride services offered by multiple independent ride-sourcing platforms, and passengers are able to request ride through such third-party integrators or connectors and…
This paper studies optimal contract design in private market investing, focusing on internal decision making in venture capital and private equity firms. A principal relies on an agent who privately exerts costly due diligence effort and…
We analyze a model of selling a single object to a principal-agent pair who want to acquire the object for a firm. The principal and the agent have different assessments of the object's value to the firm. The agent is budget-constrained…
In multimedia crowdsourcing, the requester's quality requirements and reward decisions will affect the workers' task selection strategies and the quality of their multimedia contributions. In this paper, we present a first study on how the…
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…
Algorithmic contract design studies scenarios where a principal incentivizes an agent to exert effort on her behalf. In this work, we focus on settings where the agent's type is drawn from an unknown distribution, and formalize an offline…