Related papers: Contracting against Non-contractible Outsider
We initiate the study of computing (near-)optimal contracts in succinctly representable principal-agent settings. Here optimality means maximizing the principal's expected payoff over all incentive-compatible contracts---known in economics…
This paper proposes a novel continuous-time dynamic contract framework that has a risk-limiting capability. If a principal and an agent enter into such a contract, the principal can optimally manage its performance and risk with a guarantee…
We study procurement design when the buyer is uncertain about both the value of the good and the seller's cost. The buyer has a conjectured model but does not fully trust it. She first identifies mechanisms that maximize her worst-case…
Dynamic contracts with multiple agents is a classical decentralized decision-making problem with asymmetric information. In this paper, we extend the single-agent dynamic incentive contract model in continuous-time to a multi-agent scheme…
We investigate the mechanism design problem faced by a principal who hires \emph{multiple} agents to gather and report costly information. Then, the principal exploits the information to make an informed decision. We model this problem as a…
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…
We study multi-agent contract design, where a principal incentivizes a team of agents to take costly actions that jointly determine the project success via a combinatorial reward function. While prior work largely focuses on unconstrained…
Liberalized electricity markets often include resource adequacy mechanisms that require consumers to contract with generation resources well in advance of real-time operations. While administratively defined mechanisms have most commonly…
We consider a contracting problem in which a principal hires an agent to manage a risky project. When the agent chooses volatility components of the output process and the principal observes the output continuously, the principal can…
Large electricity customers (e.g., large data centers) can exhibit huge and variable electricity demands, which poses significant challenges for the electricity suppliers to plan for sufficient capacity. Thus, it is desirable to design…
In dynamic mechanism design literature, one critical aspect has been typically ignored-the agents' periodic participation, which they can adapt and plan strategically. We propose a framework for dynamic principal-multiagent problems,…
In the combinatorial-action contract model (D\"utting et al., FOCS'21) a principal delegates the execution of a complex project to an agent, who can choose any subset from a given set of actions. Each set of actions incurs a cost to the…
We consider a general formulation of the Principal-Agent problem with a lump-sum payment on a finite horizon, providing a systematic method for solving such problems. Our approach is the following: we first find the contract that is optimal…
We consider the scenario where $N$ utilities strategically bid for electricity in the day-ahead market and balance the mismatch between the committed supply and actual demand in the real-time market, with uncertainty in demand and local…
Consider a principal who wants to search through a space of stochastic solutions for one maximizing their utility. If the principal cannot conduct this search on their own, they may instead delegate this problem to an agent with distinct…
Commitments play a crucial role in game theory, shaping strategic interactions by either altering a player's own payoffs or influencing the incentives of others through outcome-contingent payments. While most research has focused on using…
We study a setting where a set of agents engage in pairwise exchanges of freely replicable goods (e.g., digital goods such as data), where two agents grant each other a copy of a good they possess in exchange for a good they lack. Such…
Motivated by the problem of market power in electricity markets, we introduced in previous works a mechanism for simplified markets of two agents with linear cost. In standard procurement auctions, the market power resulting from the…
In this paper we investigate a Principal-Agent problem with moral hazard under Knightian uncertainty. We extend the seminal framework of Holmstr\"om and Milgrom by combining a Stackelberg equilibrium with a worst-case approach. We…
Most of the existing algorithms for fair division do not consider externalities. Under externalities, the utility an agent obtains depends not only on its allocation but also on the allocation of other agents. An agent has a positive…