In the context of a canonical agency model, we study payoff implications introducing optimally structured incentives. We do so from perspective an analyst who does not know agent's preferences for responding to incentives, but that principal knows them. provide, in particular, tight bounds on principal's expected benefit optimal incentive contracting across feasible values rents. thus show how ...

Helen saw a picture of an attractive man in an online dating page and is happy that he accepted to meet her in a coffee house. As he arrives, Helen feels disappointed because the picture posted online does not reflect the current looks of the person. Is Helen’s disappointment caused by his current looks or by the expectation she developed after seeing his picture? Tom used to like sweets, but a...

By incentive reversal we refer to situations in which an increase of rewards for all agents results in fewer agents exerting effort. We show that externalities among peers may give rise to such intriguing situations even when all agents are fully rational. We provide a necessary and sufficient condition on the organizational technology in order for it to be susceptible to incentive reversal. Th...

This article establishes the relationship between the static axiomatic theory of bargaining and the sequential strategic approach to bargaining. We consider two strategic models of alternating offers. The models differ in the source of the incentive of the bargaining parties to reach agreement: the bargainers' time preference and the risk of breakdown of negotiation. Each of the models has a un...

In this paper, we examine the application of electronic marketplaces, populated by buying and selling agents representing their human users, learning about potential business partners and making recommendations to their users. We propose a novel incentive mechanism to address the unfair rating problem arising when modeling the trustworthiness of selling agents relies on propagation of ratings p...

In a mobile crowdsourcing system, the platform utilizes ubiquitous smartphones to perform sensing tasks. For a successful mobile crowdsourcing application, the consideration of the heterogeneity of quality of sensing from different users as well as proper incentive mechanism to motivate users to contribute to the system are essential. In this thesis, we introduce quality of sensing into incenti...