In this lecture, I will talk about my work on incentive contracts, especially incentives related to moral hazard. I will provide a narrative of my intellectual journey from models narrowly focused on pay for performance to models that see the scope of the incentive problem in much broader terms featuring multitasking employees and rms making extensive use of non nancial instruments in designing...

There is a large literature aimed at characterizing the social choice functions that can be implemented in Bayes Nash equilibria. This literature typically takes agents’information as exogenously given and …xed throughout the analysis. While for some problems this may be appropriate, the assumption is problematic for others. A typical analysis, relying on the revelation principle, maximizes som...

We define an economic category of hidden-action attacks: actions made attractive by a lack of observation. We then consider its implications for computer systems. Rather than structure contracts to compensate for incentive problems, we rely on insights from social capital theory to design network topologies and interactions that undermine the potential for hidden-action attacks.

A cost-sharing problem is defined by a set of players vying to receive some good or service, and a cost function describing the cost incurred by the auctioneer as a function of the set of winners. A costsharing mechanism is a protocol that decides which players win the auction and at what prices. Three desirable but provably mutually incompatible properties of a cost-sharing mechanism are: ince...

An earlier investigation found that the performance of advanced students in a quantum mechanics course did not automatically improve from midterm to final exam on identical problems even when they were provided the correct solutions and their own graded exams. Here, we describe a study, which extended over four years, in which upper-level undergraduate students in a quantum physics course were ...

This paper introduced the status quo of laws and regulations of sustainable construction in China and investigated the existing problems of current laws and regulations through person-interviews in Beijing, Shanghai, Chongqing and Shenzhen in China. The problems include incomplete legal system, lack of guidance of higher-level laws, backward in some laws and regulations, unclear legal liability...

In random incentive mechanisms agents choose from multiple problems and a randomization device selects a single problem to determine payment. Agents are assumed to act as if they faced each problem on its own. While this approach is valid when agents are expected utility maximizers, ambiguity-averse agents may use the randomization device to hedge and thereby contaminate the data.

Computer security is addressed from the economic point of view rather than the more traditional technical one. The reasons why security fails, such as the cost of security, incentive failures, Tragedy of the Commons and the lack of knowledge are investigated. Finally, some of the proposed (economics-based) solutions to security problems such as enforcing liabilities and government regulation ar...