Before embarking on a project, a principal must often rely on an agent to learn about its profitability. We model this learning as a two-armed bandit problem and highlight the interaction between learning (experimentation) and production. We derive the optimal contract for both experimentation...

Information asymmetries can prevent markets from operating efficiently. An important example is the labor market, where employers face uncertainty about the productivity of job candidates. We examine theoretically and with laboratory experiments three key questions related to hiring via...

This review article, which was solicited by the Geneva Risk and Insurance Review, surveys work that has been done using an empirical framework for analyzing selection in insurance markets developed by Einav, Finkelstein, and Cullen (2010). We briefly review that framework, and then describe a...

Advantageous (or propitious) selection occurs when an increase in the premium of an insurance contract induces high-cost agents to quit, thereby reducing the average cost among remaining buyers. Hemenway (1990) and many subsequent contributions motivate its advent by differences in risk-aversion...

This paper applies principles of adverse selection to overcome obstacles that prevent the implementation of Pigouvian policies to internalize externalities. Focusing on negative externalities from production (such as pollution), we consider settings in which aggregate emissions are known, but...

Existing research on selection in insurance markets focuses on how adverse selection distorts prices and misallocates products across people. This ignores the distributional consequences of who pays the higher prices. In this paper, we show that the distributional incidence depends on the...

We approach the design of anti-discriminatory labor market regulation as a delegation problem. A private firm (the agent) is repeatedly faced with the opportunity of hiring one among several applicants to fill its vacancies. The firm is biased against applicants from some demographic group, and...

This survey provides an overview of theoretical and empirical research on information flows in corporations. It highlights key frictions preventing effective information flows and discusses how organizational structure and corporate governance can alleviate these frictions, focusing on three...

We consider a principal-agent relationship with adverse selection. Principals pay informational rents due to asymmetric information and sell their output in a homogeneous Cournot-oligopoly. We find that asymmetric information may mitigate or more than compensate the welfare reducing impact of...

Principal-agent models take outside options, determining participation and incentive constraints, as given. We construct a general equilibrium model where workers' reservation wages and the maximum punishment acceptable before workers quit are instead determined endogenously. We simultaneously...