I study the properties of optimal long-term contracts in an environment in which the agents type evolves stochastically over time. The model stylizes a buyer-seller relationship but the results apply quite naturally to many contractual situations including regulation and optimal income-taxation....

How should a coalition of cooperating players allocate payoffs to its members? This question arises in a broad range of situations and evokes an equally broad range of issues. For example, it raises technical issues in accounting, if the players are divisions of a corporation, but involves...

This paper considers dynamic games in which multiple principals contract sequentially and non-cooperatively with the same agent and provides characterization results useful for applications. Our benchmark model is one of private contracting in which downstream principals do not observe upstream...

I study the welfare optimal allocation of a number of identical and indivisible objects to a set of heterogeneous risk-neutral agents under the hypothesis that money is not available. Agents have independent private values, which represent the maximum time that they are will- ing to wait in line...

Although stock options are commonly observed in chief executive officer (CEO) com- pensation contracts, there is theoretical controversy about whether stock options are part of the optimal contract. Using a sample of Fortune 500 companies, we solve an agency model calibrated to the...

I study the optimal supply of exible commitment devices to people who value both commitment and exibility, and whose preferences exhibit varying degrees of time incon- sistency. I …nd that, if time inconsistency is observable, then both a monopolist and a planner supply devices that enable each...

This paper takes a mechanism design approach to federalism and assumes that local preferences are the private information of local jurisdictions. Contractual federalism is defined as a strategy-proof contract among the members of the federation supervised by a benevolent but not omniscient...

We characterize a firm's profit-maximizing turnover policy in an environment where managerial productivity changes stochastically over time and is the manager's private information. Our key positive result shows that the productivity level that the …firm requires for retention declines with the...

I study the properties of optimal long-term contracts in an environment in which the agent’s type evolves stochastically over time. The model stylizes a buyer-seller relationship but the results apply quite naturally to many contractual situations including regulation and optimal...

These notes examine the problem of how to extend envelope theorems to infinite-horizon dynamic mechanism design settings, with an application to the design of "bandit auctions."