We study the design of contracts that incentivize experts to collect information and truthfully report it to a decision maker. We depart from most of the previous literature by assuming that the transfers cannot depend on the realized state or on the ex post payoff of the decision maker. The...

We show that a solution to the problem of mechanism selection by an informed principal exists in a large class of environments with “generalized private values”: the agents’ payoff functions are independent of the principal’s type. The solution is an extension of Maskin and Tirole’s...

The founder of a start-up (principal) who has a project with uncertain returns must retain and incentivize an agent using promise of future payments and information gathering. The agent's effort incrementally advances production and such advance is a prerequisite for gathering new information....

We study information design with multiple privately informed agents who interact in a game. Each agent's utility is linear in a real-valued state. We show that there always exists an optimal mechanism that is laminar partitional and bound its “complexity.” For each type profile, such a...

We study a principal--agent model. The parties are symmetrically informed at first; the principal then designs the process by which the agent learns his type and, concurrently, the screening mechanism. Because the agent can opt out of the mechanism ex post, it must leave him with nonnegative...