Algorithmic Contract Design

A Google TechTalk, presented by Tomer Ezra, 2025-08-14
Google Algorithms Seminar - ABSTRACT: We explore the framework of contract design through a computational perspective. Contract design is a fundamental pillar of microeconomics, addressing the essential question of how to incentivize individuals effectively. The significance of contract design was acknowledged by the Nobel Prize awarded to Hart and Holmström, and it applies to various real-life scenarios, such as determining bonuses for employees, setting commission structures for sales representatives, and designing payment schemes for influencers promoting products.

While contract design has been extensively studied from an economic perspective, this talk will focus on examining it from a computational viewpoint. Specifically, we introduce combinatorial extensions of classical contract design models, where a principal delegates tasks to one or multiple agents. The agents have sets of potential actions they can take to complete the task, and the success of the task is stochastically determined by the actions chosen by the agents. We analyze the structure and computational aspects of these models, and present algorithms that provide (approximately) optimal guarantees.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER: Tomer Ezra is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center of Mathematical Sciences and Applications (CMSA) at Harvard University. Previously, he was a Sloan Postdoctoral Fellow at the Simons Laufer Mathematical Sciences Institute (SLMath) and a Postdoctoral Fellow at Sapienza University of Rome, hosted by Prof. Stefano Leonardi. He earned his PhD from Tel Aviv University, advised by Prof. Michal Feldman. His research lies at the intersection of computer science and economics, with a focus on analyzing and designing simple mechanisms and algorithms in limited information environments.