Abstract
We study a setting where a principal needs to motivate a team of agents whose combination of hidden efforts stochastically determines an outcome. In a companion paper we devise and study a basic “combinatorial agency” model for this setting, where the principal is restricted to inducing a pure Nash equilibrium. Here, we show that the principal may possibly gain from inducing a mixed equilibrium, but this gain can be bounded for various families of technologies (in particular if a technology has symmetric combinatorial structure). In addition, we present a sufficient condition under which mixed strategies yield no gain to the principal.
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Babaioff, M., Feldman, M., Nisan, N. (2006). Mixed Strategies in Combinatorial Agency. In: Spirakis, P., Mavronicolas, M., Kontogiannis, S. (eds) Internet and Network Economics. WINE 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4286. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11944874_32
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11944874_32
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-68138-0
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