Related papers: Multi-Agent Non-Discriminatory Contracts
We study the problem of fairly allocating indivisible goods among a set of agents. Our focus is on the existence of allocations that give each agent their maximin fair share--the value they are guaranteed if they divide the goods into as…
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…
We study a bilevel \emph{max-max} optimization framework for principal-agent contract design, in which a principal chooses incentives to maximize utility while anticipating the agent's best response. This problem, central to moral hazard…
In multiagent systems, the complex interaction of fixed incentives can lead agents to outcomes that are poor (inefficient) not only for the group, but also for each individual. Price of anarchy is a technical, game-theoretic definition that…
Fairness in Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) has been extensively studied, particularly in reward distribution among agents in scenarios such as goods allocation, resource division, lotteries, and bargaining systems. Fairness in MAS depends on…
Combinatorial contracts are emerging as a key paradigm in algorithmic contract design, paralleling the role of combinatorial auctions in algorithmic mechanism design. In this paper we study natural combinatorial contract settings involving…
We initiate the study of online contracts, which integrate the game-theoretic considerations of economic contract theory, with the algorithmic and informational challenges of online algorithm design. Our starting point is the classic online…
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 practice, incentive providers (i.e., principals) often cannot observe the reward realizations of incentivized agents, which is in contrast to many principal-agent models that have been previously studied. This information asymmetry…
Firms have access to abundant data on market participants. They use these data to target contracts to agents with specific characteristics, and describe these contracts in opaque terms. In response to such practices, recent proposed…
Fraud can pose a challenge in many resource allocation domains, including social service delivery and credit provision. For example, agents may misreport private information in order to gain benefits or access to credit. To mitigate this, a…
A principal contracts with an agent who sequentially searches over projects to generate a prize. The principal initially knows only one of the agent's available projects and evaluates a contract by its worst-case performance. We…
We study the optimal design of electricity contracts among a population of consumers with different needs. This question is tackled within the framework of Principal-Agent problems in presence of adverse selection. The particular features…
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…
Incorporating fairness criteria in optimization problems comes at a certain cost, which is measured by the so-called price of fairness. Here we consider the allocation of indivisible goods. For envy-freeness as fairness criterion it is…
Ranking is fundamental to many areas, such as search engine optimization, human feedback for language models, as well as peer grading. Crowdsourcing, which is often used for these tasks, requires proper incentivization to ensure accurate…
This paper studies optimal contract design in private market investing, focusing on internal decision making in venture capital and private equity firms. A principal relies on an agent who privately exerts costly due diligence effort and…
It is often argued that an agent making decisions on behalf of two or more principals who have different utility functions should adopt a {\em Pareto-optimal} policy, i.e., a policy that cannot be improved upon for one agent without making…
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 principal-agent problems where a farsighted agent takes costly actions in an MDP. The core challenge in these settings is that agent's actions are hidden to the principal, who can only observe their outcomes, namely state…