CMSA Member Seminar

Speaker: Tomer Ezra (Harvard CMSA)

Title: Contract Design in Combinatorial Settings

Abstract: We study two combinatorial settings of the contract design problem, in which a principal wants to delegate the execution of a costly task. In the first setting, the principal delegates the task to an agent that can take any subset of a given set of unobservable actions, each of which has an associated cost. The principal receives a reward which is a combinatorial function of the actions taken by the agent. In the second setting, we study the single-principal multi-agent contract problem, in which the principal motivates a team of agents to exert effort toward a given task. We design (approximately) optimal algorithms for both settings along with impossibility results for various classes of combinatorial functions.

This talk is based on joint works with Paul Duetting, Michal Feldman, Thomas Kesselheim and Maya Schlesinger.