Related papers: Anonymous Contracts
Entities in multi-agent systems may seek conflicting subobjectives, and this leads to competition between them. To address performance degradation due to competition, we consider a bi-level lottery where a social planner at the high level…
The revenue optimal mechanism for selling a single item to agents with independent but non-identically distributed values is complex for agents with linear utility (Myerson,1981) and has no closed-form characterization for agents with…
We study a Bayesian contract design problem in which a principal interacts with an unknown agent. We consider the single-parameter uncertainty model introduced by Alon et al. [2021], in which the agent's type is described by a single…
Research on promoting cooperation among autonomous, self-regarding agents has often focused on the bi-objective optimisation problem: minimising the total incentive cost while maximising the frequency of cooperation. However, the optimal…
In this paper, we consider a problem of contract theory in which several Principals hire a common Agent and we study the model in the continuous time setting. We show that optimal contracts should satisfy some equilibrium conditions and we…
A principal uses payments conditioned on stochastic outcomes of a team project to elicit costly effort from the team members. We develop a multi-agent generalization of a classic first-order approach to contract optimization by leveraging…
We study the price of anarchy of mechanisms in the presence of risk-averse agents. Previous work has focused on agents with quasilinear utilities, possibly with a budget. Our model subsumes this as a special case but also captures that…
An employer contracts with a worker to incentivize efforts whose productivity depends on ability; the worker then enters a market that pays him contingent on ability evaluation. With non-additive monitoring technology, the interdependence…
Real-world contracts are often ambiguous. While recent work by D\"utting, Feldman, Peretz, and Samuelson (EC 2023, Econometrica 2024) demonstrates that ambiguous contracts can yield large gains for the principal, their optimal solutions…
This paper considers coverage games in which a group of agents are tasked with identifying the highest-value subset of resources; in this context, game-theoretic approaches are known to yield Nash equilibria within a factor of 2 of optimal.…
We study the inefficiency of mixed equilibria, expressed as the price of anarchy, of all-pay auctions in three different environments: combinatorial, multi-unit and single-item auctions. First, we consider item-bidding combinatorial…
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 consider the problem of optimal charging of plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs). We treat this problem as a multi-agent game, where vehicles/agents are heterogeneous since they are subject to possibly different constraints. Under the…
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 techniques to incentivize self-interested agents to form socially desirable solutions in scenarios where they benefit from mutual coordination. Towards this end, we consider coordination games where agents have different intrinsic…
Principal-agent problems model scenarios where a principal incentivizes an agent to take costly, unobservable actions through the provision of payments. Such problems are ubiquitous in several real-world applications, ranging from…
Most familiar equilibrium concepts, such as Nash and correlated equilibrium, guarantee only that no single player can improve their utility by deviating unilaterally. They offer no guarantees against profitable coordinated deviations by…
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…
In this paper we study a principal-agent problem in continuous time with multiple lump-sum payments (contracts) paid at different deterministic times. We reduce the non-zero sum Stackelberg game between the principal and agent to a standard…
This paper studies optimal Public Private Partnerships contract between a public entity and a consortium, in continuous-time and with a continuous payment, with the possibility for the public to stop the contract. The public ("she") pays a…