Related papers: Discrete Screening
We analyze a principal-agent procurement problem in which the principal (she) is unaware some of the marginal cost types of the agent (he). Communication arises naturally as some types of the agent may have an incentive to raise the…
We study a screening problem in which an agent privately observes a set of feasible technologies and can strategically disclose only a subset to the principal. The principal then takes an action whose payoff consequences for both players…
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…
We study a principal-agent problem with adverse selection, where the principal does not know the agent's true cost but must design a contract to optimize a specific criterion. Unlike standard screening frameworks that allow for…
In the classical principal-agent hidden-action contract model, a principal delegates the execution of a costly task to an agent. In order to complete the task, the agent chooses an action from a set of actions, where each potential action…
Linear contracts are ubiquitous in practice, yet optimal contract theory often prescribes complex, nonlinear structures. We provide a distributional robustness justification for linear contracts. We study a principal-agent problem where the…
A principal wishes to transact business with a multidimensional distribution of agents whose preferences are known only in the aggregate. Assuming a twist (= generalized Spence-Mirrlees single-crossing) hypothesis and that agents can choose…
We study a robust selling problem where a seller attempts to sell one item to a buyer but is uncertain about the buyer's valuation distribution. Existing literature shows that robust screening provides a stronger theoretical guarantee than…
We study a robust contract design problem with deferred inspection, in which a principal allocates a scarce resource to an agent, observes the agent's realized outcome ex post at negligible cost, and conditions transfers on this information…
Through the lens of information-theoretic reductions, we examine a reductions approach to fair optimization and learning where a black-box optimizer is used to learn a fair model for classification or regression. Quantifying the complexity,…
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…
Stochastic choice-based discrete planning is a broad class of decision-making problems characterized by a sequential decision-making process involving a planner and a group of customers. The firm or planner first decides a subset of options…
We consider a broker who has to place a large order which consumes a sizable part of average daily trading volume. The broker's aim is thus to minimize execution costs he incurs from the adverse impact of his trades on market prices. By…
Motivated by programmatic advertising optimization, we consider the task of sequentially allocating budget across a set of resources. At every time step, a feasible allocation is chosen and only a corresponding random return is observed.…
The assortment problem in revenue management is the problem of deciding which subset of products to offer to consumers in order to maximise revenue. A simple and natural strategy is to select the best assortment out of all those that are…
We study a principal-agent team production model. The principal hires a team of agents to participate in a common production task. The exact effort of each agent is unobservable and unverifiable, but the total production outcome (e.g. the…
This paper studies delegation in a model of discrete choice. In the delegation problem, an uninformed principal must consult an informed agent to make a decision. Both the agent and principal have preferences over the decided-upon action…
A screening instrument is costly if it is socially wasteful and productive otherwise. A principal screens an agent with multidimensional private information and quasilinear preferences that are additively separable across two components: a…
This paper examines the optimal contracts in a two-dimensional screening model where one dimension(group identity) is verifiable by agents but not falsifiable. A principal offers contracts to agents who differ in cost types and group…
We study the identification and estimation of a multidimensional screening model, where a monopolist sells a multi-attribute product to consumers with private information about their multidimensional preferences. Under optimal screening,…