Related papers: Online Contract Design
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 investigate the mechanism design problem faced by a principal who hires \emph{multiple} agents to gather and report costly information. Then, the principal exploits the information to make an informed decision. We model this problem as a…
Contract theory studies how a principal can incentivize agents to exert costly, unobservable effort through performance-based payments. While classical economic models provide elegant characterizations of optimal solutions, modern…
We study principal-agent problems in which a principal commits to an outcome-dependent payment scheme -- called contract -- in order to induce an agent to take a costly, unobservable action leading to favorable outcomes. We consider a…
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 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…
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…
This work studies the online contract design problem. The principal's goal is to learn the optimal contract that maximizes her utility through repeated interactions, without prior knowledge of the agent's type (i.e., the agent's cost and…
Algorithmic contract design studies scenarios where a principal incentivizes an agent to exert effort on her behalf. In this work, we focus on settings where the agent's type is drawn from an unknown distribution, and formalize an offline…
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…
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…
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…
In a framework close to the one developed by Holmstr\"om and Milgrom [44], we study the optimal contracting scheme between a Principal and several Agents. Each hired Agent is in charge of one project, and can make efforts towards managing…
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 explores the capacity of artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to autonomously design incentive-compatible contracts in dual-principal-agent settings, a relatively unexplored aspect of algorithmic mechanism design. We develop a…
This paper explores the economic interactions within modern crowdsourcing markets. In these markets, employers issue requests for tasks, platforms facilitate the recruitment of crowd workers, and workers complete tasks for monetary rewards.…
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 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.…
Many real-life contractual relations differ completely from the clean, static model at the heart of principal-agent theory. Typically, they involve repeated strategic interactions of the principal and agent, taking place under uncertainty…
In the classical principal-agent problem, a principal must design a contract to incentivize an agent to perform an action on behalf of the principal. We study the classical principal-agent problem in a setting where the agent can be of one…