Moral Hazard in LTI Dynamics: A Hypothesis Testing Approach

Abstract: Many incentive design problems must contend with information asymmetries due to non-observation of efficiency (adverse selection) or non-observation of effort (moral hazard). And although a growing body of literature considers incentive design in control systems, the problem of designing incentives for control systems under information asymmetries has been less well-studied. This paper considers a model of moral hazard within control systems. In our model, the control system is described by an (affine) linear time-invariant (LTI) system with process noise. There is an agent who gets to choose (from between two choices) a linear state-feedback controller to apply to the LTI system, with one of the state-feedback controllers having a higher quadratic cost on the control inputs than the other. Our goal is to design a payment scheme that incentivizes the agent to choose the state-feedback controller that minimizes a quadratic cost on system states plus the time-discounted payment amount, subject to the understanding that the agent bears the control cost while being risk-averse with respect to their time-discounted payment. We formulate the problem as a constrained optimization, and prove that for a payment given after a fixed (but optimizable) time horizon the optimal payment scheme chooses the payment amount using a likelihood ratio hypothesis test. We numerically demonstrate our results by applying the derived optimal payment scheme to two examples: load frequency control (LFC) in power systems and wellness interventions for body weight loss.