Related papers: The (No) Value of Commitment
We consider an agent who has access to a financial market, including derivative contracts, who looks to maximise her utility. Whilst the agent looks to maximise utility over one probability measure, or class of probability measures, she…
A contract is an economic tool used by a principal to incentivize one or more agents to exert effort on her behalf, by defining payments based on observable performance measures. A key challenge addressed by contracts -- known in economics…
When does Sender, in a Sender-Receiver game, strictly value commitment? In a setting with finitely many actions and states, we establish that, generically, commitment has no value if and only if a partitional experiment is optimal.…
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…
Modeling the purposeful behavior of imperfect agents from a small number of observations is a challenging task. When restricted to the single-agent decision-theoretic setting, inverse optimal control techniques assume that observed behavior…
Environments with fixed adjustment costs such as transaction costs or \lq menu costs\rq$ $ are widespread within economic systems. The presence of fixed minimal adjustment costs produces adjustment stickiness so that agents must choose a…
In this paper, we study the problem of expected utility maximization of an agent who, in addition to an initial capital, receives random endowments at maturity. Contrary to previous studies, we treat as the variables of the optimization…
A principal must allocate a set of heterogeneous tasks (or objects) among multiple agents. The principal has preferences over the allocation. Each agent has preferences over which tasks they are assigned, which are their private…
We investigate mechanism design without payments when agents have different types of preferences. Contrary to most settings in the literature where agents have the same preference, e.g. in the facility location games all agents would like…
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…
I study a principal-agent model in which a principal hires an agent to collect information about an unknown continuous state. The agent acquires a signal whose distribution is centered around the state, controlling the signal's precision at…
Modeling the purposeful behavior of imperfect agents from a small number of observations is a challenging task. When restricted to the single-agent decision-theoretic setting, inverse optimal control techniques assume that observed behavior…
We use the recently developed probabilistic analysis of mean field games with finitely many states in the weak formulation, to set-up a principal / agent contract theory model where the principal faces a large population of agents…
We study an optimal stopping problem with an unbounded, time-dependent and discontinuous reward function. This problem is motivated by the pricing of a variable annuity contract with guaranteed minimum maturity benefit, under the assumption…
We study a novel class of mechanism design problems in which the outcomes are constrained by the payments. This basic class of mechanism design problems captures many common economic situations, and yet it has not been studied, to our…
We consider the principal-agent problem with heterogeneous agents. Previous works assume that the principal signs independent incentive contracts with every agent to make them invest more efforts on the tasks. However, in many…
This paper studies dynamic mechanism design in a quasilinear Markovian environment and analyzes a direct mechanism model of a principal-agent framework in which the agent is allowed to exit at any period. We consider that the agent's…
In cooperative multiagent planning, it can often be beneficial for an agent to make commitments about aspects of its behavior to others, allowing them in turn to plan their own behaviors without taking the agent's detailed behavior into…
A monopolist wishes to maximize her profits by finding an optimal price policy. After she announces a menu of products and prices, each agent $x$ will choose to buy that product $y(x)$ which maximizes his own utility, if positive. The…
I study the optimal design of ratings to motivate agent investment in quality when transfers are unavailable. The principal designs a rating scheme that maps the agent's quality to a (possibly stochastic) score. The agent has private…