Incomplete Contracting and AI Alignment: Hadfield-Menell points to economics framework for alignment
dhadfieldmenell · x · 2026-10-03
AI alignment researcher Dylan Hadfield-Menell highlighted his paper "Incomplete Contracting and AI Alignment" (arXiv:1804.04268, with Gillian Hadfield), arguing that the law-and-economics framework of incomplete contracts offers a systematic lens on alignment: principal-agent misalignment is a core economics problem, and human contracting works only because external institutions (culture, law) supply implied terms that fill contractual gaps. The proposed research agenda focuses on building AI that can replicate the human cognitive processes linking individual contracts to this supporting structure. He also cited "Inverse Reward Design" as showing how scoped rewards plus inference can mitigate the challenge.
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