A principal relies on information held by a biased agent in decision-making. Without a prior over the circumstances that may arise, she designs a delegation rule to minimize the worst-case regret. Optimal delegation combines a default action, a fixed gap above it, and a higher discretionary interval with random boundaries. This structure separates two margins: whether the decision departs from the default and how much discretion the agent receives conditional on doing so. The default and gap limit excessive adjustment when little adaptation is warranted, while the higher interval preserves flexibility when larger adjustments are needed. Randomizing the discretionary interval's floor and ceiling hedges the principal's exposure across potential worst-case states. This rule is optimal among all stochastic incentive-compatible mechanisms.
We consider a robust delegation problem in which the principal does not know the distribution from which the underlying state is drawn. The principal can choose a general randomized mechanism and maximizes her worst-case expected payoff over all state distributions. Our main result characterizes the robustly optimal me...
Terrence M. McGovern, Jan Benedikt Napp, Wen-Jun Zheng· 0 citations
An expert may misreport her forecast to influence a decision she cares about. We study contracts that elicit both her belief about a verifiable state and her stake in a binary action. If every belief is possible at two distinct stakes, exact incentive compatibility prevents a belief-only mechanism from letting the acti...
A sender with commitment provides additional information to an already informed receiver. Final posterior means must be more dispersed than initial means and less dispersed than the state, in convex order. We characterize when these two plausibility constraints are also sufficient, so that every distribution satisfying...
We study a setting in which an agent receives private information before choosing from a menu and anticipates hindsight scrutiny. Such scrutiny creates a motive for conservatism toward menu expansions. Our key axiom, conservatism, is a direct weakening of preference for flexibility: Adding an option is weakly beneficia...
