Related papers: Contracting with a Mechanism Designer
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…
This paper analyzes a class of Stackelberg games where different actors compete for shared resources and a central authority tries to balance the demand through a pricing mechanism. Situations like this can for instance occur when fleet…
In principal-agent models, a principal offers a contract to an agent to perform a certain task. The agent exerts a level of effort that maximizes her utility. The principal is oblivious to the agent's chosen level of effort, and conditions…
All-pay auctions, a common mechanism for various human and agent interactions, suffers, like many other mechanisms, from the possibility of players' failure to participate in the auction. We model such failures, and fully characterize…
Linear contracts are ubiquitous in practice, yet optimal contract theory often prescribes complex, nonlinear structures. We provide a distributional robustness justification for linear contracts. We study a principal-agent problem where the…
As the number of prosumers with distributed energy resources (DERs) grows, the conventional centralized operation scheme may suffer from conflicting interests, privacy concerns, and incentive inadequacy. In this paper, we propose an energy…
This paper studies the dynamic pricing mechanism for data products in demand-driven markets through a game-theoretic framework. We develop a three-tier Stackelberg game model to capture the hierarchical strategic interactions among key…
An employer contracts with a worker to incentivize efforts whose productivity depends on ability; the worker then enters a market that pays him contingent on ability evaluation. With non-additive monitoring technology, the interdependence…
We study a dynamic market setting where an intermediary interacts with an unknown large sequence of agents that can be either sellers or buyers: their identities, as well as the sequence length $n$, are decided in an adversarial, online…
In the combinatorial action model of contract design, a principal delegates a complex project to an agent, incentivizing a subset of actions from a ground set of $n$ actions, via a linear contract. Computing the optimal contract is a…
In modern buildings renewable energy generators and storage devices are spreading, and consequently the role of the users in the power grid is shifting from passive to active. We design a demand response scheme that exploits the prosumers'…
Digital labor platforms are increasingly used to procure human input, ranging from annotating data and red-teaming AI models, to ride-sharing and food delivery. A central concern in such markets is the ability of platforms to suppress wages…
We study the optimal contract problem in the \emph{combinatorial actions} framework of D\"utting et al.~[FOCS'21], where a principal delegates a project to an agent who chooses a subset of hidden, costly actions, and the resulting reward is…
Modern AI systems increasingly operate inside markets and institutions where data, behavior, and incentives are endogenous. This paper develops an economic foundation for multi-agent learning by studying a principal-agent interaction in a…
I study a moral hazard problem between a principal and multiple agents who experience positive peer effects represented by a (weighted) network. Under the optimal linear contract, the principal provides high-powered incentives to central…
Crowdsourced wireless community networks can effectively alleviate the limited coverage issue of Wi-Fi access points (APs), by encouraging individuals (users) to share their private residential Wi-Fi APs with others. In this paper, we…
We consider the problem of designing mechanisms that interact with strategic agents through strategic intermediaries (or mediators), and investigate the cost to society due to the mediators' strategic behavior. Selfish agents with private…
We study the design and approximation of optimal crowdsourcing contests. Crowdsourcing contests can be modeled as all-pay auctions because entrants must exert effort up-front to enter. Unlike all-pay auctions where a usual design objective…
This paper studies the optimal mechanisms for the vertically integrated utility to dispatch and incentivize the third-party demand response (DR) providers in its territory. A framework is proposed, with three-layer coupled Stackelberg and…
We study the problem faced by a service provider that has to sell services to a user. In our model the service provider proposes various payment options (a menu) to the user which may be based, for example, on the quality of the service.…