This paper considers a firm whose potential employees have private information on both their productivity and the extent of their fairness concerns. Fairness is modelled as inequity aversion, where fair-minded workers suffer if their colleagues get more income net of production costs. Screening...

This paper studies the role of exchange policies as a price discrimination device in a sequential screening model with heterogeneous goods. In the first period, agents are uncertain about their ordinal preferences over a set of horizontally differentiated goods, but have private information...

The paper studies procurement contracts with pre-project investigations in the presence of adverse selection and moral hazard. To model the procurer's roblem, we extend a standard sequential screening model to endogenous information acquisition with moral hazard. The optimal contract displays...

We consider a variant of the Tullock rent-seeking contest. Under symmetric information we determine equilibrium strategies and prove their uniqueness. Then, we assume contestants to be privately informed about their costs of effort. We prove existence of a pure-strategy equilibrium and provide a...

We analyze the effects of lower bounds on wages, e.g., minimum wages or liability limits, on job design within firms. In our model, two tasks contribute to non-veriable firm value and affect an imperfect performance measure. The tasks can be assigned to either one or two agents. In the absence...

This paper considers the canonical sequential screening model and shows that when the agent has an expost outside option, the principal does not benefit from eliciting the agent's information sequentially. Unlike in the standard model without expost outside options, the optimal contract is...

We consider a two-stage principal-agent model with limited liability in which a CEO is employed as agent to gather information about suitable merger targets and to manage the merged corporation in case of an acquisition. Our results show that the CEO systematically recommends targets with low...

We study ex post information rents in sequential screening models where the agent receives private ex ante and ex post information. The principal has to pay ex post information rents for preventing the agent to coordinate lies about his ex ante and ex post information. When the agent's ex ante...

Should contract design induce an agent to conduct a precontractual investigation even though, in any case, the agent will become fully informed after the signing of the contract? This paper shows that imperfect investigations might be encouraged. The result stands in contrast to previous...

The paper extends the optimal delegation framework pioneered by Holmström (1977, 1984) to a dynamic environment where, at the outset, the agent privately knows his ability to interpret decision relevant private information received later on. We show that any mechanism can be implemented by a...