Due to technological progress, recent performance is often more informative about future performance prospects than is older performance. We incorporate information decay in a career concern model in which performance depends on type and effort and contract renewal is based on the performance...

The procurement of an innovation involves motivating a research effort to generate a new idea and then implementing that idea efficiently. If research efforts are unverifiable and implementation costs are private information, a trade-off arises between the two objectives. The optimal mechanism...