It is often suggested that incentive schemes under moral hazard can be gamed by an agent with superior knowledge of the environment, and that deliberate lack of transparency about the incentive scheme can reduce gaming. We formally investigate these arguments in a two-task moral hazard model in...

We study optimal contracting in team settings, featuring stylized aspects of production environments with complex tasks. Agents have many opportunities to shirk, task-level monitoring is needed to provide useful incentives, and because it is difficult to write individual performance into formal...

We study a discrete-time model of repeated moral hazard without commitment. In every period, a principal finances a project, choosing the scale of the project and a contingent payment plan for an agent, who has the opportunity to appropriate the returns of a successful project unbeknownst the...

We show that if agents are risk neutral, prizes outperform wages when there is sufficient pride and envy relative to the noisiness of performance. If agents are risk averse, prizes are a necessary supplement to wages (as bonuses).

We show that if agents are risk neutral, prizes outperform wages if and only if there is sufficient pride and envy relative to the noisiness of performance. If agents are risk averse, prizes are a necessary supplement to wages (as bonuses).

There are many situations in which a customer's proclivity to buy the product of any firm depends not only on the classical attributes of the product such as its price and quality, but also on who else is buying the same product. We model these situations as games in which firms compete for...

We study optimal contracting in a setting where a firm repeatedly interacts with multiple workers, and can compensate them based on publicly available performance signals as well as privately reported peer evaluations. If the evaluation and the effort provision are done by different workers (as...

We analyze a stochastic equilibrium contract-posting model. Firms post employment contracts, wages contingent on all payoff-relevant states. Aggregate productivity is subject to persistent shocks. Both employed and unemployed workers search randomly for these contracts, and are free to quit at...

We provide a simple but novel model of trade agreements that highlights the role of transaction costs, renegotiation and dispute settlement. The model allows us to characterize the appropriate remedy for breach and whether the agreement should be structured as a system of "property rights" or...

We analyze the canonical nonlinear pricing model with limited information. A seller offers a menu with a finite number of choices to a continuum of buyers with a continuum of possible valuations. By revealing an underlying connection to quantization theory, we derive the optimal finite menu for...