Related papers: Delegated Contracting
We analyze the delegation of pricing by participants, representing firms, to a collusive, self-learning algorithm in a repeated Bertrand experiment. In the baseline treatment, participants set prices themselves. In the other treatments,…
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…
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…
We introduce a novel model of contracts with combinatorial actions that accounts for sequential and adaptive agent behavior. As in the standard model, a principal delegates the execution of a costly project to an agent. There are $n$…
Negotiation is a very common interaction between automated agents. Many common negotiation protocols work with cardinal utilities, even though ordinal preferences, which only rank the outcomes, are easier to elicit from humans. In this work…
We investigate the problem of a principal looking to contract an expert to provide a probability forecast for a categorical event. We assume all experts have a common public prior on the event's probability, but can form more accurate…
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 a setting in which a principal selects an agent to execute a collection of tasks according to a specified priority sequence. Agents, however, have their own individual priority sequences according to which they wish to execute the…
We study auction design in a setting where agents can communicate over a censorship-resistant broadcast channel like the ones we can implement over a public blockchain. We seek to design credible, strategyproof auctions in a model that…
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…
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…
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…
A principal who values an object allocates it to one or more agents. Agents learn private information (signals) from an information designer about the allocation payoff to the principal. Monetary transfer is not available but the principal…
A designer relies on an experimenter to provide information to a decision maker, but the experimenter has incentives to persuade rather than merely transmit information. Anticipating this motive, the designer can restrict the set of…
Can a principal still offer optimal dynamic contracts that are linear in end-of-period outcomes when the agent controls a process that exhibits memory? We provide a positive answer by considering a general Gaussian setting where the output…
This paper develops a decomposition methodology for common agency games in which each principal's payoff depends on her own outcome and the agent's type, but not on rivals' outcomes. The key step reduces each principal's best-response…
In the context of humans operating with artificial or autonomous agents in a hybrid team, it is essential to accurately identify when to authorize those team members to perform actions. Given past examples where humans and autonomous…
We analyze conditional optimization problems arising in discrete time Principal-Agent problems of delegated portfolio optimization with linear contracts. Applying tools from Conditional Analysis we show that some results known in the…
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…
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…