Related papers: Screening Workers with Affirmative Action
A divisible budget must be allocated to several projects, and agents are asked for their opinion on how much they would give to each project. We consider that an agent is satisfied by a division of the budget if, for at least a certain…
Agents that learn to select optimal actions represent a prominent focus of the sequential decision-making literature. In the face of a complex environment or constraints on time and resources, however, aiming to synthesize such an optimal…
In this paper we show how the relaxation techniques can be used to establish the existence of an optimal contract in presence of information asymmetry. The method we illustrate was initially motivated by the problem of designing optimal…
When a new product or technology is introduced, potential consumers can learn its quality by trying the product, at a risk, or by letting others try it and free-riding on the information that they generate. We propose a dynamic game to…
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…
How should one jointly design tests and the arrangement of agencies to administer these tests (testing procedure)? To answer this question, we analyze a model where a principal must use multiple tests to screen an agent with a…
We study buyer-optimal procurement mechanisms when quality is contractible. When some costs are borne by every participant of a procurement auction regardless of winning, the classic analysis should be amended. We show that an optimal…
A planner wants to select one agent out of n agents on the basis of a binary characteristic that is commonly known to all agents but is not observed by the planner. Any pair of agents can either be friends or enemies or impartials of each…
We consider settings in which we wish to incentivize myopic agents (such as Airbnb landlords, who may emphasize short-term profits and property safety) to treat arriving clients fairly, in order to prevent overall discrimination against…
A decision maker is choosing between an active action (e.g., purchase a house, invest certain stock) and a passive action. The payoff of the active action depends on the buyer's private type and also an unknown state of nature. An…
We study the identification and estimation of a multidimensional screening model, where a monopolist sells a multi-attribute product to consumers with private information about their multidimensional preferences. Under optimal screening,…
We consider the problem of locating a facility on a network, represented by a graph. A set of strategic agents have different ideal locations for the facility; the cost of an agent is the distance between its ideal location and the…
We study a decision-maker's problem of finding optimal monetary incentive schemes for retention when faced with agents whose participation decisions (stochastically) depend on the incentive they receive. Our focus is on policies constrained…
In this paper, we consider a general distributed system with multiple agents who select and then implement actions in the system. The system has an operator with a centralized objective. The agents, on the other hand, are selfinterested and…
We study a bilateral trade problem where a principal has private information that is revealed with delay, such as a seller who does not yet know her production cost. Postponing the contracting process incurs a costly delay, while early…
We consider the design of experiments to evaluate treatments that are administered by self-interested agents, each seeking to achieve the highest evaluation and win the experiment. For example, in an advertising experiment, a company wishes…
We consider a voting problem in which a set of agents have metric preferences over a set of alternatives, and are also partitioned into disjoint groups. Given information about the preferences of the agents and their groups, our goal is to…
We characterize the optimal reward functions (scoring rules) that incentivize an agent to acquire information and report it truthfully to the principal. The optimal scoring rules let the agent make a simple binary bet in single-dimensional…
We study simple and approximately optimal auctions for agents with a particular form of risk-averse preferences. We show that, for symmetric agents, the optimal revenue (given a prior distribution over the agent preferences) can be…
We consider the problem of Adverse Selection and optimal derivative design within a Principal-Agent framework. The principal's income is exposed to non-hedgeable risk factors arising, for instance, from weather or climate phenomena. She…