Related papers: Screening Workers with Affirmative Action
A principal has $m$ identical objects to allocate among a group of $n$ agents. Objects are desirable and the principal's value of assigning an object to an agent is the agent's private information. The principal can verify up to $k$ agents,…
We consider the problem of designing affirmative action policies for selecting the top-k candidates from a pool of applicants. We assume that for each candidate we have socio-demographic attributes and a series of variables that serve as…
In the combinatorial action model of contract design, a principal delegates a complex project to an agent, incentivizing a subset of actions from a ground set of $n$ actions, via a linear contract. Computing the optimal contract is a…
We consider a hidden-action principal-agent model, in which actions require different amounts of effort, and the agent privately knows his ability that determines his cost of effort. We show that linear contracts admit approximation…
In many societal resource allocation domains, machine learning methods are increasingly used to either score or rank agents in order to decide which ones should receive either resources (e.g., homeless services) or scrutiny (e.g., child…
Recent technology advances have enabled firms to flexibly process and analyze sophisticated employee performance data at a reduced and yet significant cost. We develop a theory of optimal incentive contracting where the monitoring…
In many settings, multiple uninformed agents bargain simultaneously with a single informed agent in each of multiple periods. For example, workers and firms negotiate each year over salaries, and the firm has private information about the…
We study hidden-action principal-agent problems in which a principal commits to an outcome-dependent payment scheme (called contract) so as to incentivize the agent to take a costly, unobservable action leading to favorable outcomes. In…
We consider a principal agent project selection problem with asymmetric information. There are $N$ projects and the principal must select exactly one of them. Each project provides some profit to the principal and some payoff to the agent…
Fraud can pose a challenge in many resource allocation domains, including social service delivery and credit provision. For example, agents may misreport private information in order to gain benefits or access to credit. To mitigate this, a…
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 the optimal design of electricity contracts among a population of consumers with different needs. This question is tackled within the framework of Principal-Agent problems in presence of adverse selection. The particular features…
We study optimal contract design for large populations of heterogeneous agents whose actions generate network spillovers represented by an interaction function. In a linear-quadratic framework, we solve the finite-agent problem and its…
We study the fundamental problem of designing contracts in principal-agent problems under uncertainty. Previous works mostly addressed Bayesian settings in which principal's uncertainty is modeled as a probability distribution over agent's…
We show that in delegation problems, a principal benefits from belief misalignment vis-\`a-vis an agent when the latter can flexibly acquire costly information. The agent optimally succumbs to confirmatory learning, leading him to favor the…
We study a moral hazard problem with adverse selection: a risk-neutral agent can directly control the output distribution and possess private information about the production environment. The principal designs a menu of contracts satisfying…
A principal and an agent can launch a project under unanimous consent. Their individual payoffs from the project depend on an underlying state, and the agent privately knows his own preference. The principal can conduct a test to learn…
We consider a continuous time Principal-Agent model on a finite time horizon, where we look for the existence of an optimal contract both parties agreed on. Contrary to the main stream, where the principal is modelled as risk-neutral, we…
We consider a social choice setting in which agents and alternatives are represented by points in a metric space, and the cost of an agent for an alternative is the distance between the corresponding points in the space. The goal is to…
We propose a distributionally robust principal agent formulation, which generalizes some common variants of worst-case and Bayesian principal agent problems. We construct a theoretical framework to certify whether any surjective contract…