In the principal-agent problem formulated in [Myerson 1982], agents have private information (type) and make private decisions (action), both of which are unobservable to the principal. Myerson pointed out an elegant solution that relies on the revelation principle, which states that without loss of generality optimal coordination mechanisms of this problem can be assumed to be truthful and direct. Consequently, the problem can be solved by a linear program when the support sets of the action and type spaces are finite. In this paper, we extend Myerson's results to the setting where the principal's action space might be infinite and subject to additional design constraints. This generalized principal-agent model unifies several important design problems -- including contract design, information design, and Bayesian Stackelberg games -- and encompasses them as special cases. We present a revelation principle for this general model, based on which a polynomial-time algorithm is derived for computing the optimal coordination mechanism. This algorithm not only implies new efficient algorithms simultaneously for all the aforementioned special cases but also significantly simplifies previous approaches in the literature.
翻译:在[Myerson 1982] 所拟订的主要试剂问题中,代理人拥有私人信息(类型),并作出私人决定(行动),两者都无法为首席人物所了解。Myerson指出,一个优雅的解决办法,依靠的是披露原则,该原则指出,在不丧失一般性最佳协调机制的情况下,可以认为这一问题是真实和直接的。因此,当支持成套行动和类型空间的组合是有限的时,这个问题可以通过线性程序来解决。在本文中,我们将Myerson的结果扩大到可能使首席人物的行动空间无限并受到额外设计限制的环境。这一通用的首席代理人模式将一些重要的设计问题(包括合同设计、信息设计和Bayesian Stakelberg游戏)统一起来,并将这些问题作为特殊案例包括在内。我们为这一一般模式提出了一个启迪原则,根据它可以产生计算最佳协调机制的多时段算算法。这一算法不仅意味着所有上述特殊案例都有新的有效算法,而且还大大简化了文献中以前的方法。