Promise competition is prevalent in many economic environments, but promise keeping is often difficult to observe. We study the value of transparency for promise competition and ask whether promises still offer an opportunity to honor future obligations when outcomes do not allow for observing...

Subjective evaluations are widely used, but call for different contracts from classical moral-hazard settings. Previous literature shows that contracts require payments to third parties. I show that the (implicit) assumption of deterministic contracts makes payments to third parties necessary....