Related papers: Contracting with Imperfect Commitment: Minimal Can…
A principal hires an agent to acquire soft information about an unknown state. Even though neither how the agent learns nor what the agent discovers are contractible, we show the principal is unconstrained as to what information the agent…
We study principal-agent problems in which a principal commits to an outcome-dependent payment scheme -- called contract -- in order to induce an agent to take a costly, unobservable action leading to favorable outcomes. We consider a…
Critical infrastructure protection (CIP) is envisioned to be one of the most challenging security problems in the coming decade. One key challenge in CIP is the ability to allocate resources, either personnel or cyber, to critical…
Modern engineering systems include many components of different types and functions. Verifying that these systems satisfy given specifications can be an arduous task, as most formal verification methods are limited to systems of moderate…
We study the combinatorial contracting problem of D\"utting et al. [FOCS '21], in which a principal seeks to incentivize an agent to take a set of costly actions. In their model, there is a binary outcome (the agent can succeed or fail),…
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…
I study a two-sided marriage market in which agents have incomplete preferences -- i.e., they find some alternatives incomparable. The strong (weak) core consists of matchings wherein no coalition wants to form a new match between…
We study limited strategic leadership. A collection of subsets covering the leader's action space determines her commitment opportunities. We characterize the outcomes resulting from all possible commitment structures of this kind. If the…
We propose a new principal-agent framework where a principal communicates a roadmap -- a set of plausible outcome models and a prior belief over them -- to guide an agent who is learning the value of innovation. The agent trusts the prior…
We model a procurement scenario in which two \textit{imperfect} bidders act simultaneously on behalf of a single buyer, a configuration common in display advertising and referred to as \textit{side-by-side bidding} but largely unexplored in…
Many real-life contractual relations differ completely from the clean, static model at the heart of principal-agent theory. Typically, they involve repeated strategic interactions of the principal and agent, taking place under uncertainty…
We consider mechanisms for truthfully eliciting probabilistic predictions from a group of experts. The standard approach -- using a proper scoring rule to separately reward each expert -- is not robust to collusion: experts may collude to…
We develop an incomplete-contracting model with accounting-based covenants to study how covenant accounting adjustments are made and what properties they exhibit. Standard accounting rules (e.g., GAAP) can generate false-alarm errors or…
Motivated by the growing requirements on the operation of complex engineering systems, we present contracts as specifications for continuous-time linear dynamical systems with inputs and outputs. A contract is defined as a pair of…
I provide a sufficient condition under which a principal does not benefit from committing to a mechanism in economic models represented by a maximisation problem under constraints. These problems include mechanism design, principal-agent…
In this work we generalize standard Decision Theory by assuming that two outcomes can also be incomparable. Two motivating scenarios show how incomparability may be helpful to represent those situations where, due to lack of information,…
This paper studies the topic of cost-efficiency in incomplete markets. A payoff is called cost-efficient if it achieves a given probability distribution at some given investment horizon with a minimum initial budget. Extensive literature…
In this paper we study a principal-agent problem in continuous time with multiple lump-sum payments (contracts) paid at different deterministic times. We reduce the non-zero sum Stackelberg game between the principal and agent to a standard…
Conformal prediction provides prediction sets with finite-sample marginal coverage, but many applications require coverage guarantees that adapt to individual test points, a subpopulation, or a structural component of the data. Existing…
By definition, an $\m$-primary ideal $I$ in a 2-dimensional regular local ring $(R, \m)$ is contracted if $I=R \cap IR[\m/x]$ for some $x \in \m \setminus \m^2$. Contracted ideals have been introduced by Zariski and used for proving the…