Incentivizing the Dynamic Workforce: Learning Contracts in the Gig-Economy

In principal-agent models, a principal offers a contract to an agent to perform a certain task. The agent exerts a level of effort that maximizes her utility. The principal is oblivious to the agent's chosen level of effort, and conditions her wage only on possible outcomes. In this work, we consider a model in which the principal is unaware of the agent's utility and action space. She sequentially offers contracts to identical agents, and observes the resulting outcomes. We present an algorithm for learning the optimal contract under mild assumptions. We bound the number of samples needed for the principal obtain a contract that is within $\epsilon$ of her optimal net profit for every $\epsilon>0$

Seasonal Variation in the Home Ranges of Black Curassow, Crax alector , in French Guiana

Cracidae is the most threatened avian family in the Neotropics, mainly because of habitat destruction, heavy hunting pressure and poaching. In French Guiana, Black Curassows are heavily hunted, although basic knowledge of the ecological and demographical traits of the species remains limited. Such a gap prevents any attempt to assess the impact of hunting and to help stakeholders to develop proposals ensuring hunting sustainability. The spatial relationship between animals and their habitat is important for conservation management, being related to population densities through complex patterns. Here, we report on a radio-tracking study of Black Curassows in tropical primary rainforest, in Nouragues National Reserve, French Guiana. The aims of the study were to estimate home range size and its variation across seasons, and to quantify movement patterns of the birds. We captured and fitted VHF tags to four adults, and tracked them for 10 to 21.5 months. Daily movements were recorded, and home ranges estimated using the Kernel Density method, for two consecutive wet seasons and one dry season. Using 95% and 50% Kernel densities, the average annual home range and core area were 96.3± 32.6 ha (SE) and 22.8 ± 2.8 ha respectively. Home ranges appeared spatially stable over the two years, and overlapped between neighbouring groups. During the dry season, Black Curassows did not migrate but tended to enlarge their home range, with greater daily movements and higher home range overlap. Although additional data are still needed, our results can help to improve the knowledge and management of this poorly studied species