Related papers: The (No) Value of Commitment
We study a variant of the principal-agent problem in which the principal does not directly observe the agent's effort outcome; rather, she gets a signal about the agent's action according to a variable information structure designed by a…
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…
This paper studies a dynamic screening model in which a principal hires an agent with limited liability. The agent's private cost of working is an i.i.d. draw from a continuous distribution. His working status is publicly observable. The…
We study bilateral trade with interdependent values as an informed-principal problem. The mechanism-selection game has multiple equilibria that differ with respect to principal's payoff and trading surplus. We characterize the equilibrium…
In this paper, we consider a general distributed system with multiple agents who select and then implement actions in the system. The system has an operator with a centralized objective. The agents, on the other hand, are selfinterested and…
We study the design of optimal allocation mechanisms in an environment where agents and goods arrive stochastically. Agents have private types that determine the principal payoff. Either agents or goods can be held in a queue at a flow cost…
Many settings of interest involving humans and machines -- from virtual personal assistants to autonomous vehicles -- can naturally be modelled as principals (humans) delegating to agents (machines), which then interact with each other on…
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…
We study a repeated Principal Agent problem between a long lived Principal and Agent pair in a prior free setting. In our setting, the sequence of realized states of nature may be adversarially chosen, the Agent is non-myopic, and the…
In dynamic programming and reinforcement learning, the policy for the sequential decision making of an agent in a stochastic environment is usually determined by expressing the goal as a scalar reward function and seeking a policy that…
Motivating careerists is challenging for political organizations. Without explicit contracts, careerists often pander to public opinions or their superiors' preferences. Worse, when tasked with implementing these distorted decisions, they…
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…
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,…
An agent observes the set of available projects and proposes some, but not necessarily all, of them. A principal chooses one or none from the proposed set. We solve for a mechanism that minimizes the principal's worst-case regret. We…
We consider a multi-agent delegation mechanism without money. In our model, given a set of agents, each agent has a fixed number of solutions which is exogenous to the mechanism, and privately sends a signal, e.g., a subset of solutions, to…
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…
The general picture of game theoretic modeling dealt with here is characterized by a set of big players, also referred to as principals or major agents, acting on the background of large pools of small players, the impact of the behavior of…
We consider the problem of Adverse Selection and optimal derivative design within a Principal-Agent framework. The principal's income is exposed to non-hedgeable risk factors arising, for instance, from weather or climate phenomena. She…
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…
In a situation of moral hazard, this paper investigates the problem of Principal with $n$ Agents when the number of Agents $n$ goes to infinity. There is competition between the Agents expressed by the fact that they optimize their utility…