Contract Design for Sequential Actions
Abstract
We introduce a novel model of contracts with combinatorial actions that captures sequential and adaptive agent behavior. As in the standard setting, a principal delegates a costly project to an agent and incentivizes them via a contract specifying payments for each possible outcome. The novelty of our model lies in allowing the agent to select actions sequentially — after each action, they observe the outcome and decide whether to stop or continue. This framework captures common scenarios in which agents can make multiple attempts to achieve a desired outcome.
Fields of Study & Subjects
Auction Theory and Applications
Multi-Agent Systems and Negotiation
Game Theory and Applications
Publication details
- Journal / source
- Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics eBooks
- Pages
- 6537–6570
- Publication date
- 1 January 2026
- Language
- EN