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Related papers: Delegated Contracting

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In this paper, we study axiomatic foundations of Bayesian persuasion, where a principal (i.e., sender) delegates the task of choice making after informing a biased agent (i.e., receiver) about the payoff relevant uncertain state (see, e.g.,…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-12-30 Youichiro Higashi , Kemal Ozbek , Norio Takeoka

We study the problem of agent-based negotiation in combinatorial domains. It is difficult to reach optimal agreements in bilateral or multi-lateral negotiations when the agents' preferences for the possible alternatives are not common…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2012-02-20 Minyi Li , Quoc Bao Vo , Ryszard Kowalczyk

A principal selects a team of agents for collaborating on a joint project. The principal aims to design a revenue-optimal contract that incentivize the team of agents to exert costly effort while satisfying fairness constraints. We show…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Matteo Castiglioni , Junjie Chen , Yingkai Li

Limited memory of decision-makers is often neglected in economic models, although it is reasonable to assume that it significantly influences the models' outcomes. The hidden-action model introduced by Holmstr\"om also includes this…

General Economics · Economics 2021-05-27 Patrick Reinwald , Stephan Leitner , Friederike Wall

Adding a capacity constraint to a hidden-action principal-agent problem results in the same set of Pareto optimal contracts as the unconstrained problem where output is scaled down by a constant factor. This scaling factor is increasing in…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2024-12-03 Aubrey Clark

We study the mechanism design problem of selling a public good to a group of agents by a principal in the correlated private value environment. We assume the principal only knows the expectations of the agents' values, but does not know the…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2022-01-06 Wanchang Zhang

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…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2024-08-05 Francesco Giovannoni , Toomas Hinnosaar

Consumers are increasingly delegating purchase decisions to AI agents, providing natural-language descriptions of their preferences and identity. We argue that these representations constitute an information channel, role coherence, through…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2026-04-30 Soogand Alavi , Salar Nozari

We propose to study electricity capacity remuneration mechanism design through a Principal-Agent approach. The Principal represents the aggregation of electricity consumers (or a representative entity), subject to the physical risk of…

General Economics · Economics 2020-09-02 Clémence Alasseur , Heythem Farhat , Marcelo Saguan

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

We study a Bayesian persuasion problem with externalities. In this model, a principal sends signals to inform multiple agents about the state of the world. Simultaneously, due to the existence of externalities in the agents' utilities, the…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-12-18 Jonathan Shaki , Jiarui Gan , Sarit Kraus

A principal has $m$ identical objects to allocate among a group of $n$ agents. Objects are desirable and the principal's value of assigning an object to an agent is the agent's private information. The principal can verify up to $k$ agents,…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2024-09-04 Albin Erlanson , Andreas Kleiner

Many real-life contractual relations differ completely from the clean, static model at the heart of principal-agent theory. Typically, they involve repeated strategic interactions of the principal and agent, taking place under uncertainty…

We study how to allocate resources to participants who can strategically misrepresent their deservingness at a cost. A principal assigns item(s) (or money) among multiple agents on the basis of their costly signals. Each agent's signal…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-03-05 Yingkai Li , Xiaoyun Qiu

We consider reallocation problems in settings where the initial endowment of each agent consists of a subset of the resources. The private information of the players is their value for every possible subset of the resources. The goal is to…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2014-04-29 Liad Blumrosen , Shahar Dobzinski

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

When multiple informative equilibria are possible in a general cheap talk game, how much information can a principal guarantee herself? To answer this question, I define the notion of worst-case implementation-implementation via the worst…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-02-17 Andrei Iakovlev

We propose decentralized primal-dual methods for cooperative multi-agent consensus optimization problems over both static and time-varying communication networks, where only local communications are allowed. The objective is to minimize the…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-02-23 Erfan Yazdandoost Hamedani , Necdet Serhat Aybat

We examine problems of ``intermediated implementation,'' in which a single principal can only regulate limited aspects of the consumption bundles traded between intermediaries and agents with hidden characteristics. An example is sales, in…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2020-01-22 Anqi Li , Yiqing Xing

This paper seeks to establish a framework for directing a society of simple, specialized, self-interested agents to solve what traditionally are posed as monolithic single-agent sequential decision problems. What makes it challenging to use…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-08-17 Michael Chang , Sidhant Kaushik , S. Matthew Weinberg , Thomas L. Griffiths , Sergey Levine