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We design an optimal contract between a demand response aggregator (DRA) and a customer for incentive-based demand response. We consider a setting in which the customer is asked to reduce her consumption by the DRA and she is compensated…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2024-10-30 Donya G. Dobakhshari , Vijay Gupta

We consider the robust contract design problem when the principal only has limited information about the actions the agent can take. The principal evaluates a contract according to its worst-case performance caused by the uncertain action…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2024-06-18 Bo Peng , Zhihao Gavin Tang

We study principal-agent problems in which a principal commits to an outcome-dependent payment scheme (a.k.a. contract) so as to induce an agent to take a costly, unobservable action. We relax the assumption that the principal perfectly…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2021-06-02 Matteo Castiglioni , Alberto Marchesi , Nicola Gatti

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…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-05-19 Guillermo Alonso Alvarez , Erhan Bayraktar , Ibrahim Ekren

This work studies the online contract design problem. The principal's goal is to learn the optimal contract that maximizes her utility through repeated interactions, without prior knowledge of the agent's type (i.e., the agent's cost and…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-06-11 Shiliang Zuo

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…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Elad Lavi , Hadas Shachnai , Inbal Talgam-Cohen

A platform commits to a search algorithm that maps prices to search order. Given this algorithm, sellers set prices, and consumers engage in sequential search. This framework generalizes the ordered search literature. We introduce a special…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-03-06 Xiaoyu Chen , Jingmin Huang , Yibo Lian

The rapid advancement of AI and other emerging technologies has triggered exponential growth in computing resources demand. Faced with prohibitive infrastructure costs for large-scale computing clusters, users are increasingly resorting to…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-04-22 Zhengyan Deng , Yusen Zheng , Chenliang Sheng , Shaowen Qin

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…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2019-09-17 Clémence Alasseur , Ivar Ekeland , Romuald Elie , Nicolás Hernández Santibáñez , Dylan Possamaï

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…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2024-01-17 Peter Zhang

We study a robust contract design problem with deferred inspection, in which a principal allocates a scarce resource to an agent, observes the agent's realized outcome ex post at negligible cost, and conditions transfers on this information…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2026-01-12 Halil I. Bayrak , Martin Bichler

We present a continuous-time contract whereby a top-level player can incentivize a hierarchy of players below him to act in his best interest despite only observing the output of his direct subordinate. This paper extends Sannikov's…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2015-11-25 Christopher W. Miller , Insoon Yang

We study a general online combinatorial auction problem in algorithmic mechanism design. A provider allocates multiple types of capacity-limited resources to customers that arrive in a sequential and arbitrary manner. Each customer has a…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-10-10 Xiaoqi Tan , Alberto Leon-Garcia , Yuan Wu , Danny H. K. Tsang

Motivated by the success of the serial dictatorship mechanism in social choice settings, we explore its usefulness in tackling various combinatorial optimization problems. We do so by considering an abstract model, in which a set of agents…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-09-09 Ioannis Caragiannis , Nidhi Rathi

We study hidden-action principal-agent problems with multiple agents. These are problems in which a principal commits to an outcome-dependent payment scheme in order to incentivize some agents to take costly, unobservable actions that lead…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-02-01 Matteo Castiglioni , Alberto Marchesi , Nicola Gatti

Combinatorial Auctions are a central problem in Algorithmic Mechanism Design: pricing and allocating goods to buyers with complex preferences in order to maximize some desired objective (e.g., social welfare, revenue, or profit). The…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2015-03-19 Avrim Blum , Anupam Gupta , Yishay Mansour , Ankit Sharma

This paper explores the economic interactions within modern crowdsourcing markets. In these markets, employers issue requests for tasks, platforms facilitate the recruitment of crowd workers, and workers complete tasks for monetary rewards.…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Tian Bai , Yiding Feng , Yaohao Liu , Mengfan Ma , Mingyu Xiao

Contract theories have been proposed to formally support distributed and decentralized system design while ensuring safe system integration. In this paper we propose hypercontracts, a generic model with a richer structure for its underlying…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2022-06-14 Inigo Incer , Albert Benveniste , Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli , Sanjit A. Seshia

We introduce a new class of combinatorial markets in which agents have covering constraints over resources required and are interested in delay minimization. Our market model is applicable to several settings including scheduling, cloud…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2017-04-17 Nikhil Devanur , Jugal Garg , Ruta Mehta , Vijay V. Vazirani , Sadra Yazdanbod

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…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2023-07-25 Majid Mahzoon , Ali Shourideh , Ariel Zetlin-Jones