TY - GEN
T1 - Combinatorial agency
AU - Babaioff, Moshe
AU - Feldman, Michal
AU - Nisan, Noam
PY - 2006
Y1 - 2006
N2 - Much recent research concerns systems, such as the Internet, whose components are owned and operated by different parties, each with his own "selfish" goal. The field of Algorithmic Mechanism Design handles the issue of private information held by the different parties in such computational settings. This paper deals with a complementary problem in such settings: handling the "hidden actions" that are performed by the different parties. Our model is a combinatorial variant of the classical principal-agent problem from economic theory. In our setting a principal must motivate a team of strategic agents to exert costly effort on his behalf, but their actions are hidden from him. Our focus is on cases where complex combinations of the efforts of the agents influence the outcome. The principal motivates the agents by offering to them a set of contracts, which together put the agents in an equilibrium point of the induced game. We present formal models for this setting, suggest and embark on an analysis of some basic issues, but leave many questions open.
AB - Much recent research concerns systems, such as the Internet, whose components are owned and operated by different parties, each with his own "selfish" goal. The field of Algorithmic Mechanism Design handles the issue of private information held by the different parties in such computational settings. This paper deals with a complementary problem in such settings: handling the "hidden actions" that are performed by the different parties. Our model is a combinatorial variant of the classical principal-agent problem from economic theory. In our setting a principal must motivate a team of strategic agents to exert costly effort on his behalf, but their actions are hidden from him. Our focus is on cases where complex combinations of the efforts of the agents influence the outcome. The principal motivates the agents by offering to them a set of contracts, which together put the agents in an equilibrium point of the induced game. We present formal models for this setting, suggest and embark on an analysis of some basic issues, but leave many questions open.
KW - Agency Theory
KW - Contracts
KW - Hidden-Action
KW - Incentives
KW - Mechanism Design
KW - Moral Hazard
KW - Price of Unaccountability
KW - Principal-Agent Model
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=33748714319&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/1134707.1134710
DO - 10.1145/1134707.1134710
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AN - SCOPUS:33748714319
SN - 1595932364
SN - 9781595932365
T3 - Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce
SP - 18
EP - 28
BT - Proceedings of the 7th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce 2006
PB - Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
T2 - 7th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce
Y2 - 11 June 2006 through 15 June 2006
ER -