Related papers: Contracting with Imperfect Commitment: Minimal Can…
Contract scheduling is a general technique that allows to design a system with interruptible capabilities, given an algorithm that is not necessarily interruptible. Previous work on this topic has largely assumed that the interruption is a…
We study a continuous time contracting model in which a principal hires a risk averse agent to manage a project over a finite horizon and provides sequential payments whose timing is endogenously determined. The resulting nonzero-sum…
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…
In principal-agent models, a principal offers a contract to an agent to perform a certain task. The agent exerts a level of effort that maximizes her utility. The principal is oblivious to the agent's chosen level of effort, and conditions…
We introduce a novel model of contracts with combinatorial actions that accounts for sequential and adaptive agent behavior. As in the standard model, a principal delegates the execution of a costly project to an agent. There are $n$…
This paper considers the hidden-action model of the principal-agent problem, in which a principal incentivizes an agent to work on a project using a contract. We investigate whether contracts with bounded payments are learnable and…
We analyze conditional optimization problems arising in discrete time Principal-Agent problems of delegated portfolio optimization with linear contracts. Applying tools from Conditional Analysis we show that some results known in the…
Designing large-scale control systems to satisfy complex specifications is hard in practice, as most formal methods are limited to systems of modest size. Contract theory has been proposed as a modular alternative to formal methods in…
We study the design of an optimal insurance contract in which the insured maximizes her expected utility and the insurer limits the variance of his risk exposure while maintaining the principle of indemnity and charging the premium…
In the classical principal-agent hidden-action contract model, a principal delegates the execution of a costly task to an agent. In order to complete the task, the agent chooses an action from a set of actions, where each potential action…
In the classical principal-agent problem, a principal must design a contract to incentivize an agent to perform an action on behalf of the principal. We study the classical principal-agent problem in a setting where the agent can be of one…
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…
Contracts are a well-established approach for describing and analyzing behavioral aspects of web service compositions. The theory of contracts comes equipped with a notion of compatibility between clients and servers that ensures that every…
Each period, two players bargain over a unit of surplus. Each player chooses between remaining flexible and committing to a take-it-or-leave-it offer at a cost. If players' committed demands are incompatible, then the current-period surplus…
We consider a general framework of optimal mechanism design under adverse selection and ambiguity about the type distribution of agents. We prove the existence of optimal mechanisms under minimal assumptions on the contract space and prove…
I analyze long-term contracting in insurance markets with asymmetric information. The buyer privately observes her risk type, which evolves stochastically over time. A long-term contract specifies a menu of insurance policies, contingent on…
Real-world contracts are often ambiguous. While recent work by D\"utting, Feldman, Peretz, and Samuelson (EC 2023, Econometrica 2024) demonstrates that ambiguous contracts can yield large gains for the principal, their optimal solutions…
We perform a detailed theoretical study of the value of a class of participating policies with four key features: $(i)$ the policyholder is guaranteed a minimum interest rate on the policy reserve; $(ii)$ the contract can be terminated by…
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…
We suggest that the analysis of incomplete contracting developed by law and economics researchers can provide a useful framework for understanding the AI alignment problem and help to generate a systematic approach to finding solutions. We…