Consider a setting in which a principal induces effort from an agent to reduce the arrival rate of a Poisson process of adverse events. The effort is costly to the agent, and unobservable to the principal, unless the principal is monitoring the agent. Monitoring ensures effort but is costly to...

We present a practical algorithm for computing the minimum volume n-dimensional ellipsoid that must contain m given points a_1, ..., a_m \in R^n. This convex constrained problem arises in a variety of applied computational settings, particularly in data mining and robust statistics. Its...