Multi-agent contracts

P Dütting, T Ezra, M Feldman… - Proceedings of the 55th …, 2023 - dl.acm.org
We study a natural combinatorial single-principal multi-agent contract design problem, in
which a principal motivates a team of agents to exert effort toward a given task. At the heart …

The sample complexity of online contract design

B Zhu, S Bates, Z Yang, Y Wang, J Jiao… - arxiv preprint arxiv …, 2022 - arxiv.org
We study the hidden-action principal-agent problem in an online setting. In each round, the
principal posts a contract that specifies the payment to the agent based on each outcome …

Optimal no-regret learning for one-sided lipschitz functions

P Dütting, G Guruganesh… - … on Machine Learning, 2023 - proceedings.mlr.press
Inspired by applications in pricing and contract design, we study the maximization of one-
sided Lipschitz functions, which only provide the (weaker) guarantee that they do not grow …

Combinatorial contracts beyond gross substitutes

P Dutting, M Feldman, Y Gal Tzur - Proceedings of the 2024 Annual ACM …, 2024 - SIAM
We study the combinatorial contracting problem of Dütting et al.[13], in which a principal
seeks to incentivize an agent to take a set of costly actions. In their model, there is a binary …

Designing menus of contracts efficiently: The power of randomization

M Castiglioni, A Marchesi, N Gatti - … of the 23rd ACM Conference on …, 2022 - dl.acm.org
We study hidden-action principal-agent problems in which a principal commits to an
outcome-dependent payment scheme (called contract) so as to incentivize the agent to take …

Deep contract design via discontinuous networks

T Wang, P Duetting, D Ivanov… - Advances in …, 2023 - proceedings.neurips.cc
Contract design involves a principal who establishes contractual agreements about
payments for outcomes that arise from the actions of an agent. In this paper, we initiate the …

Multi-agent combinatorial contracts

P Duetting, T Ezra, M Feldman, T Kesselheim - … of the 2025 Annual ACM-SIAM …, 2025 - SIAM
Combinatorial contracts are emerging as a key paradigm in algorithmic contract design,
paralleling the role of combinatorial auctions in algorithmic mechanism design. In this paper …

Contracting with a learning agent

G Guruganesh, Y Kolumbus, J Schneider… - arxiv preprint arxiv …, 2024 - arxiv.org
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 …

Bayesian analysis of linear contracts

T Alon, P Dütting, Y Li, I Talgam-Cohen - arxiv preprint arxiv:2211.06850, 2022 - arxiv.org
We provide a justification for the prevalence of linear (commission-based) contracts in
practice under the Bayesian framework. We consider a hidden-action principal-agent model …

On the (in) approximability of combinatorial contracts

T Ezra, M Feldman, M Schlesinger - arxiv preprint arxiv:2311.18425, 2023 - arxiv.org
We study two combinatorial contract design models--multi-agent and multi-action--where a
principal delegates the execution of a costly project to others. In both settings, the principal …