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We initiate the study of computing (near-)optimal contracts in succinctly representable principal-agent settings. Here optimality means maximizing the principals expected payoff over all incentive-compatible contracts---known in economics as second-best solutions. We also study a natural relaxation to approximately incentive-compatible contracts. We focus on principal-agent settings with succinctly described (and exponentially large) outcome spaces. We show that the computational complexity of computing a near-optimal contract depends fundamentally on the number of agent actions. For settings with a constant number of actions, we present a fully polynomial-time approximation scheme (FPTAS) for the separation oracle of the dual of the problem of minimizing the principals payment to the agent, and use this subroutine to efficiently compute a delta-incentive-compatible (delta-IC) contract whose expected payoff matches or surpasses that of the optimal IC contract. With an arbitrary number of actions, we prove that the problem is hard to approximate within any constant c. This inapproximability result holds even for delta-IC contracts where delta is a sufficiently rapidly-decaying function of c. On the positive side, we show that simple linear delta-IC contracts with constant delta are sufficient to achieve a constant-factor approximation of the first-best (full-welfare-extracting) solution, and that such a contract can be computed in polynomial time.
The Chamberlin-Courant and Monroe rules are fundamental and well-studied rules in the literature of multi-winner elections. The problem of determining if there exists a committee of size k that has a Chamberlin-Courant (respectively, Monroe) score of
We initiate the study of a quantity that we call coordination complexity. In a distributed optimization problem, the information defining a problem instance is distributed among $n$ parties, who need to each choose an action, which jointly will form
Bit retrieval is the problem of reconstructing a binary sequence from its periodic autocorrelation, with applications in cryptography and x-ray crystallography. After defining the problem, with and without noise, we describe and compare various algor
We consider the {em vector partition problem}, where $n$ agents, each with a $d$-dimensional attribute vector, are to be partitioned into $p$ parts so as to minimize cost which is a given function on the sums of attribute vectors in each part. The pr
We investigate the parameterized complexity in $a$ and $b$ of determining whether a graph~$G$ has a subset of $a$ vertices and $b$ edges whose removal disconnects $G$, or disconnects two prescribed vertices $s, t in V(G)$.