Algorithmic Contract Design (Keynote)

Algorithmic contract design is a new frontier at the interface of economics and computation, studying scenarios where a principal delegates the execution of a costly project to an agent or a team of agents, and incentivizes them through a contract that specifies payments contingent on the project's success. This domain has gained increasing interest from the theoretical computer science community, particularly in the realm of combinatorial contracts. In this talk, I will survey two distinct models of combinatorial contracts, each illustrating unique sources of complexity encountered in contract design. The first model allows an agent to select from a set of possible actions, examining the intricate dependencies among these actions. The second model involves motivating a team of agents, focusing on the interdependencies within various agent combinations. I will present both (approximation) algorithms and hardness results concerning the optimal contract problem in these settings. The talk is based on joint work with Paul Duetting, Tomer Ezra, Yoav Gal-Tzur, Thomas Kesselheim and Maya Schlesinger.