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Related papers: Contracting against Non-contractible Outsider

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Many-to-many matching with contracts is studied in the framework of revealed preferences. All preferences are described by choice functions that satisfy natural conditions. Under a no-externality assumption individual preferences can be…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2020-03-05 Daniel Lehmann

Contract theory studies how a principal can incentivize agents to exert costly, unobservable effort through performance-based payments. While classical economic models provide elegant characterizations of optimal solutions, modern…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-10-20 Michal Feldman

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…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2020-11-09 Federico Echenique , Antonio Miralles , Jun Zhang

We study optimal contract design for large populations of heterogeneous agents whose actions generate network spillovers represented by an interaction function. In a linear-quadratic framework, we solve the finite-agent problem and its…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-05-19 Guillermo Alonso Alvarez , Erhan Bayraktar , Ibrahim Ekren

Public-Private Partnership (PPP) is a contract between a public entity and a consortium, in which the public outsources the construction and the maintenance of an equipment (hospital, university, prison...). One drawback of this contract is…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2017-03-07 Ishak Hajjej , Caroline Hillairet , Mohamed Mnif , Monique Pontier

We introduce a new model of combinatorial contracts in which a principal delegates the execution of a costly task to an agent. To complete the task, the agent can take any subset of a given set of unobservable actions, each of which has an…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-09-03 Paul Duetting , Tomer Ezra , Michal Feldman , Thomas Kesselheim

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…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-01-27 Paul Duetting , Michal Feldman , Tomasz Ponitka , Ermis Soumalias

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 $n$…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-04-22 Tomer Ezra , Michal Feldman , Maya Schlesinger

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

We suggest that the analysis of incomplete contracting developed by law and economics researchers can provide a useful framework for understanding the AI alignment problem and help to generate a systematic approach to finding solutions. We…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2018-04-13 Dylan Hadfield-Menell , Gillian Hadfield

This article is addressing the problem of river sharing between two agents along a river in the presence of negative externalities. Where, each agent claims river water based on the hydrological characteristics of the territories. The…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2019-12-13 Shivshanker Singh Patel , Parthasarathy Ramachandran

This paper revisits the classic instrument choice problem in a setting with consumption externalities, through the lens of robust mechanism design. A regulator can implement any incentive-compatible policy but is uncertain about how…

General Economics · Economics 2026-03-18 Zi Yang Kang

A principal hires an agent to acquire soft information about an unknown state. Even though neither how the agent learns nor what the agent discovers are contractible, we show the principal is unconstrained as to what information the agent…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2023-07-31 Mark Whitmeyer , Kun Zhang

This paper studies continuous-time optimal contracting in a hierarchy problem which generalises the model of Sung (2015). The hierarchy is modeled by a series of interlinked principal-agent problems, leading to a sequence of Stackelberg…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-07-22 Emma Hubert

We consider two sided matching markets consisting of agents with non-transferable utilities; agents from the opposite sides form matching pairs (e.g., buyers-sellers) and negotiate the terms of their math which may include a monetary…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2012-12-05 Saeed Alaei , Kamal Jain , Azarakhsh Malekian

We explore the deliberate infusion of ambiguity into the design of contracts. We show that when the agent is ambiguity-averse and hence chooses an action that maximizes their minimum utility, the principal can strictly gain from using an…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-09-17 Paul Dütting , Michal Feldman , Daniel Peretz , Larry Samuelson

The interconnectivity of cyber and physical systems and Internet of things has created ubiquitous concerns of cyber threats for enterprise system managers. It is common that the asset owners and enterprise network operators need to work…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2019-08-14 Juntao Chen , Quanyan Zhu , Tamer Başar

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…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-02-23 Yurong Chen , Zhaohua Chen , Xiaotie Deng , Zhiyi Huang

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

Contract theory typically assumes full commitment by the principal, but many contracts fix some payoff-relevant decisions while leaving others discretionary. We ask when imperfect commitment is equivalent to full commitment. For contracts…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-05-27 Seungjin Han , Siyang Xiong