We study the costs and benefits of additional information in agency contracts, when there is the possibility of renegotiation. The literature to date assumes that contractual simplicity, i.e. the omission of informative contractual contingencies, can only arise in multi-period environments, and...

We consider multiple-principal multiple-agent models of moral hazard: Principals compete through mechanisms in the presence of agents who take unobservable actions. In this context, we provide a rationale for restricting principals to make use of simple mechanisms, which correspond to direct...

We investigate the scope for supervisory activities in organizations in which information is non-verifiable and opportunism severe. A principal-supervisor-agent hierarchy is considered. Side-contracts between supervisor and agent may be reached both before and after the agent has chosen his...

Deadlines and penalties are widely used to incentivize effort. We model how these incentive contracts affect the work rate and time taken in a procurement setting, characterizing the efficient contract design. Using new micro-level data on Minnesota highway construction contracts that includes...

Moral hazard models with hidden saving decisions are useful to study such diverse problems as unemployment insurance, income taxation, executive compensation, or human capital policies. How can we solve such models? In general, this is very difficult. Under the conditions derived in this paper,...

This paper investigates optimal contracts between risk-neutral parties when both exert efforts and the agent faces limited liability. It is shown that a simple share-or-nothing with bonus contract (SonBo for short) is optimal and implements the second-best outcome, i.e., the best possible...

This paper studies the optimal contract for a risk-neutral agency with limited liability. We introduce a novel formulation of the model, in which the contract design problem reduces to a problem of constructing the distribution function of a random variable. This formulation directly balances...

We study dynamic moral hazard when the principal can only commit to spot contracts. Principal and agent are ex ante symmetrically uncertain about the difficulty of the job, and update their beliefs on observing output. Since the agent's effort is private, he has an additional incentive to shirk...

I study a continuous time principal-agent model in which an unknown parameter and the agent's hidden effort affect the distribution of observable outcomes. The principal and the agent learn about the parameter by observing past outcomes. The agent's current effort has an implicit long-term...

We analyze how the wealth of an agent and its distribution affect the profit of the principal by considering the simple moral hazard model developed by Baker and Hall (2004). The first result is that a rich agent is preferred over a poor one, which differs from the result of Thiele and Wambach...