Related papers: Anonymous Contracts
Many multiagent systems rely on collective decision-making among self-interested agents, which raises deep questions about coalition formation and stability. We study social choice with endogenous, outcome-contingent transfers, where agents…
We study principal-agent problems in which a principal commits to an outcome-dependent payment scheme (a.k.a. contract) so as to induce an agent to take a costly, unobservable action. We relax the assumption that the principal perfectly…
We study the role of regulatory inspections in a contract design problem in which a principal interacts separately with multiple agents. Each agent's hidden action includes a dimension that determines whether they undertake an extra costly…
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…
Social dilemmas present a significant challenge in multi-agent cooperation because individuals are incentivised to behave in ways that undermine socially optimal outcomes. Consequently, self-interested agents often avoid collective…
We study the power and limitations of posted prices in multi-unit markets, where agents arrive sequentially in an arbitrary order. We prove upper and lower bounds on the largest fraction of the optimal social welfare that can be guaranteed…
We explore the deliberate infusion of ambiguity into the design of contracts. We show that when the agent is ambiguity-averse and hence chooses an action that maximizes their minimum utility, the principal can strictly gain from using an…
We study a multi-agent contract design problem with moral hazard. In our model, each agent exerts costly effort towards an individual task at which it may either succeed or fail, and the principal, who wishes to encourage effort, has an…
This paper studies contracting in the presence of externalities with a non-contractible outsider. Multiple equilibria arise from strategic symmetry between the insider agent and the outsider. To address strategic uncertainty, the principal…
We consider moral hazard problems where a principal has access to rich monitoring data about an agent's action. Rather than focusing on optimal contracts (which are known to in general be complicated), we characterize the optimal rate at…
A principal selects a team of agents for collaborating on a joint project. The principal aims to design a revenue-optimal contract that incentivize the team of agents to exert costly effort while satisfying fairness constraints. We show…
We investigate the probabilistic feasibility of randomized solutions to two distinct classes of uncertain multi-agent optimization programs. We first assume that only the constraints of the program are affected by uncertainty, while the…
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 a strategic behavior in reinsurance bilateral transactions, where agents choose the risk preferences they will appear to have in the transaction. Within a wide class of risk measures, we identify agents' strategic choices to a…
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 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 consider the robust contract design problem when the principal only has limited information about the actions the agent can take. The principal evaluates a contract according to its worst-case performance caused by the uncertain action…
We study a single-agent contracting environment where the agent has misspecified beliefs about the outcome distributions for each chosen action. First, we show that for a myopic Bayesian learning agent with only two possible actions, the…
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 many multiagent domains a set of agents exert effort towards a joint outcome, yet the individual effort levels cannot be easily observed. A typical example for such a scenario is routing in communication networks, where the sender can…