Related papers: Contracting with Imperfect Commitment: Minimal Can…

An approach to the formal description of service contracts is presented in terms of automata. We focus on the basic property of guaranteeing that in the multi-party composition of principals each of them gets his requests satisfied, so that…

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…

We consider a dynamic moral hazard problem between a principal and an agent, where the sole instrument the principal has to incentivize the agent is the disclosure of information. The principal aims at maximizing the (discounted) number of…

Motivated by the emergence of decentralized machine learning (ML) ecosystems, we study the delegation of data collection. Taking the field of contract theory as our starting point, we design optimal and near-optimal contracts that deal with…

In cooperative human decision-making, agreements are often not total; a partial degree of agreement is sufficient to commit to a decision and move on, as long as one is somewhat confident that the involved parties are likely to stand by…

A principal selects a team of agents for collaborating on a joint project. The principal aims to design a revenue-optimal contract that incentivize the team of agents to exert costly effort while satisfying fairness constraints. We show…

Many-to-many matching with contracts is studied in the framework of revealed preferences. All preferences are described by choice functions that satisfy natural conditions. Under a no-externality assumption individual preferences can be…

I study whether and which expert incentives can be provided at what cost when the states of the world become non-contractible, but there is some noisy observation about the states that can be contracted upon. A principal hires an agent to…

We initiate the study of computing (near-)optimal contracts in succinctly representable principal-agent settings. Here optimality means maximizing the principal's expected payoff over all incentive-compatible contracts---known in economics…

We study multi-agent contract design, where a principal incentivizes a team of agents to take costly actions that jointly determine the project success via a combinatorial reward function. While prior work largely focuses on unconstrained…

In this paper, we present a probabilistic adaptation of an Assume/Guarantee contract formalism. For the sake of generality, we assume that the extended state machines used in the contracts and implementations define sets of runs on a given…

We study a two-period moral hazard problem; there are two agents, with action sets that are unknown to the principal. The principal contracts with each agent sequentially, and seeks to maximize the worst-case discounted sum of payoffs,…

We study a model of moral hazard with heterogeneous beliefs where each of agent's actions gives rise to a pair of probability distributions over output levels, one representing the beliefs of the agent and the other those of the principal.…

We study a finite horizon optimal contracting problem of a risk-neutral principal and a risk-averse agent who receives a stochastic income stream when the agent is unable to make commitments. The problem involves an infinite number of…

A principal provides nondiscriminatory incentives for independent and identical agents. The principal cannot observe the agents' actions, nor does she know the entire set of actions available to them. It is shown, very generally, that any…

A well-intentioned principal provides information to a rationally inattentive agent without internalizing the agent's cost of processing information. Whatever information the principal makes available, the agent may choose to ignore some.…

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…

We use the theory of cooperative games for the design of fair insurance contracts. An insurance contract needs to specify the premium to be paid and a possible participation in the benefit (or surplus) of the company. It results from the…

Public-Private Partnership (PPP) is a contract between a public entity and a consortium, in which the public outsources the construction and the maintenance of an equipment (hospital, university, prison...). One drawback of this contract is…

We study the range of prices at which a rational agent should contemplate transacting a financial contract outside a given securities market. Trading is subject to nonproportional transaction costs and portfolio constraints and full…