Related papers: Anonymous Contracts
We study the asymptotic average-case efficiency of static and anonymous posted prices for $n$ agents and $m(n)$ multiple identical items with $m(n)=o\left(\frac{n}{\log n}\right)$. When valuations are drawn i.i.d from some fixed continuous…
We study the classic principal-agent model when the signal observed by the principal is chosen by the agent. We fully characterize the optimal information structure from an agent's perspective in a general moral hazard setting with limited…
We study the design of contracts that incentivize a researcher to conduct a costly experiment, extending the work of Yoder (2022) from binary states to a general state space. The cost is private information of the researcher. When the…
We study the problem of maximizing Nash social welfare, which is the geometric mean of agents' utilities, in two well-known models. The first model involves one-sided preferences, where a set of indivisible items is allocated among a group…
All-pay auctions, a common mechanism for various human and agent interactions, suffers, like many other mechanisms, from the possibility of players' failure to participate in the auction. We model such failures, and fully characterize…
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…
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…
In this paper we study variations of the standard Hotelling-Downs model of spatial competition, where each agent attracts the clients in a restricted neighborhood, each client randomly picks one attractive agent for service. Two utility…
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…
As agentic AI becomes more widespread, agents with distinct and possibly conflicting goals will interact in complex ways. These multi-agent interactions pose a fundamental challenge, particularly in social dilemmas, where agents' individual…
AI agents will be predictable in certain ways that traditional agents are not. Where and how can we leverage this predictability in order to improve social welfare? We study this question in a game-theoretic setting where one agent can pay…
We study a generic principal-agent problem in continuous time on a finite time horizon. We introduce a framework in which the agent is allowed to employ measure-valued controls and characterise the continuation utility as a solution to a…
We investigate whether fairness is compatible with efficiency in economies with multi-self agents, who may not be able to integrate their multiple objectives into a single complete and transitive ranking. We adapt envy-freeness,…
This paper studies continuous-time optimal contracting in a hierarchy problem which generalises the model of Sung (2015). The hierarchy is modeled by a series of interlinked principal-agent problems, leading to a sequence of Stackelberg…
We propose a multi-agent variant of the classical multi-armed bandit problem, in which there are $N$ agents and $K$ arms, and pulling an arm generates a (possibly different) stochastic reward for each agent. Unlike the classical multi-armed…
We introduce and study a computational version of the principal-agent problem -- a classic problem in Economics that arises when a principal desires to contract an agent to carry out some task, but has incomplete information about the agent…
When machine learning is outsourced to a rational agent, conflicts of interest might arise and severely impact predictive performance. In this work, we propose a theoretical framework for incentive-aware delegation of machine learning…
We study multi-agent contract design with combinatorial actions, under budget constraints, and for a broad class of objective functions, including profit (principal's utility), reward, and welfare. Our first result is a strong…
A multiagent system may be thought of as an artificial society of autonomous software agents and we can apply concepts borrowed from welfare economics and social choice theory to assess the social welfare of such an agent society. In this…
This paper examines the optimal contracts in a two-dimensional screening model where one dimension(group identity) is verifiable by agents but not falsifiable. A principal offers contracts to agents who differ in cost types and group…