Related papers: Motivating Innovation with Misspecified Contracts
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…
Results from the communication complexity literature have demonstrated that stable matching requires communication: one cannot find or verify a stable match without having access to essentially all of the ordinal preference information held…
We study a repeated Principal Agent problem between a long lived Principal and Agent pair in a prior free setting. In our setting, the sequence of realized states of nature may be adversarially chosen, the Agent is non-myopic, and the…
We consider a general problem where an agent is in a multi-agent environment and must plan for herself without any prior information about her opponents. At each moment, this pivotal agent is faced with a trade-off between exploiting her…
Toward explaining the persistence of biased inferences, we propose a framework to evaluate competing (mis)specifications in strategic settings. Agents with heterogeneous (mis)specifications coexist and draw Bayesian inferences about their…
In this work, we study sequential contracts under matroid constraints. In the sequential setting, an agent can take actions one by one. After each action, the agent observes the stochastic value of the action and then decides which action…
This work considers a novel information design problem and studies how the craft of payoff-relevant environmental signals solely can influence the behaviors of intelligent agents. The agents' strategic interactions are captured by a Markov…
We study how to allocate resources to participants who can strategically misrepresent their deservingness at a cost. A principal assigns item(s) (or money) among multiple agents on the basis of their costly signals. Each agent's signal…
This paper proposes a novel continuous-time dynamic contract framework that has a risk-limiting capability. If a principal and an agent enter into such a contract, the principal can optimally manage its performance and risk with a guarantee…
In the combinatorial-action contract model (D\"utting et al., FOCS'21) a principal delegates the execution of a complex project to an agent, who can choose any subset from a given set of actions. Each set of actions incurs a cost to the…
Learning in multi-agent environments is difficult due to the non-stationarity introduced by an opponent's or partner's changing behaviors. Instead of reactively adapting to the other agent's (opponent or partner) behavior, we propose an…
We study a repeated contracting setting in which a Principal adaptively chooses amongst $k$ Agents at each of $T$ rounds. The Agents are non-myopic, and so a mechanism for the Principal induces a $T$-round extensive form game amongst the…
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 two-sided matching markets, and study the incentives of agents to circumvent a centralized clearing house by signing binding contracts with one another. It is well-known that if the clearing house implements a stable match and…
We study the problem of designing an optimal sequence of incentives that a principal should offer to an agent so that the agent's optimal behavior under the incentives realizes the principal's objective expressed as a temporal logic…
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…
Recent papers have introduced the Motivation Dynamics framework, which uses bifurcations to encode decision-making behavior in an autonomous mobile agent. In this paper, we consider the multi-agent extension of the Motivation Dynamics…
Individuals use models to guide decisions, but many models are wrong. This paper studies which misspecified models are likely to persist when individuals also entertain alternative models. Consider an agent who uses her model to learn the…
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 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.…