Regret-Minimizing Contracts: Agency Under Uncertainty

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Bernasconi, Martino, Castiglioni, Matteo, Marchesi, Alberto
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Bernasconi, Martino
Castiglioni, Matteo
Marchesi, Alberto
author_facet Bernasconi, Martino
Castiglioni, Matteo
Marchesi, Alberto
contents We study the fundamental problem of designing contracts in principal-agent problems under uncertainty. Previous works mostly addressed Bayesian settings in which principal's uncertainty is modeled as a probability distribution over agent's types. In this paper, we study a setting in which the principal has no distributional information about agent's type. In particular, in our setting, the principal only knows some uncertainty set defining possible agent's action costs. Thus, the principal takes a robust (adversarial) approach by trying to design contracts which minimize the (additive) regret: the maximum difference between what the principal could have obtained had them known agent's costs and what they actually get under the selected contract.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_13156
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Regret-Minimizing Contracts: Agency Under Uncertainty
Bernasconi, Martino
Castiglioni, Matteo
Marchesi, Alberto
Computer Science and Game Theory
We study the fundamental problem of designing contracts in principal-agent problems under uncertainty. Previous works mostly addressed Bayesian settings in which principal's uncertainty is modeled as a probability distribution over agent's types. In this paper, we study a setting in which the principal has no distributional information about agent's type. In particular, in our setting, the principal only knows some uncertainty set defining possible agent's action costs. Thus, the principal takes a robust (adversarial) approach by trying to design contracts which minimize the (additive) regret: the maximum difference between what the principal could have obtained had them known agent's costs and what they actually get under the selected contract.
title Regret-Minimizing Contracts: Agency Under Uncertainty
topic Computer Science and Game Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.13156