Welfare and Beyond in Multi-Agent Contracts

ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC), pp. 895

Abstract

A principal delegates a project to a team S from a pool of n agents. The project's value if all agents in S exert costly effort is f(S). To incentivize the agents to participate, the principal assigns each agent i ∈ S a share ρi ∈ [0,1] of the project's final value (i.e., designs n linear contracts). The shares must be feasible—their sum should not exceed 1. It is well-understood how to design these contracts to maximize the principal's own expected utility, but what if the goal is to coordinate the agents toward maximizing social welfare?

Authors 3

1. Gil Aharoni

   Tel Aviv University

   Affiliation as printed

   Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel

2. Martin Hoefer Aachen

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany

3. Inbal Talgam-Cohen

   Tel Aviv University

   Affiliation as printed

   Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel