Related papers: Fair Team Contracts
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…
We introduce and study the problem of designing optimal contracts under fairness constraints on the task assignments and compensations. We adopt the notion of envy-free (EF) and its relaxations, $\epsilon$-EF and envy-free up to one item…
We study a natural combinatorial single-principal multi-agent contract design problem, in which a principal motivates a team of agents to exert effort toward a given task. At the heart of our model is a reward function, which maps the agent…
We study linear contracts for combinatorial problems in multi-agent settings. In this problem, a principal designs a linear contract with several agents, each of whom can decide to take a costly action or not. The principal observes only…
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…
Fairness is desirable yet challenging to achieve within multi-agent systems, especially when agents differ in latent traits that affect their abilities. This hidden heterogeneity often leads to unequal distributions of wealth, even when…
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 study the optimal contract problem in the \emph{combinatorial actions} framework of D\"utting et al.~[FOCS'21], where a principal delegates a project to an agent who chooses a subset of hidden, costly actions, and the resulting reward is…
We consider the classic principal-agent model of contract theory, in which a principal designs an outcome-dependent compensation scheme to incentivize an agent to take a costly and unobservable action. When all of the model…
In principal-agent models, a principal offers a contract to an agent to perform a certain task. The agent exerts a level of effort that maximizes her utility. The principal is oblivious to the agent's chosen level of effort, and conditions…
A principal provides nondiscriminatory incentives for independent and identical agents. The principal cannot observe the agents' actions, nor does she know the entire set of actions available to them. It is shown, very generally, that any…
We study a new class of contract design problems where a principal delegates the execution of multiple projects to a set of agents. The principal's expected reward from each project is a combinatorial function of the agents working on it.…
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…
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…
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…
The problem of computing near-optimal contracts in combinatorial settings has recently attracted significant interest in the computer science community. Previous work has provided a rich body of structural and algorithmic insights into this…
Constrained maximization of submodular functions poses a central problem in combinatorial optimization. In many realistic scenarios, a number of agents need to maximize multiple submodular objectives over the same ground set. We study such…
Consider costly and time-consuming tasks that add up to the success of a project, and must be fitted into a given time-frame. This is an instance of the classic budgeted maximization (knapsack) problem, which admits an FPTAS. Now assume an…
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…
A group of agents each exert effort to produce a joint output, with the complementarities between their efforts represented by a (weighted) network. Under equity compensation, a principal motivates the agents to work by giving them shares…