This paper studies a principal-agent relation in which the principal's private information about the agent's effort … and not on the public signal. Nonetheless, public information is valuable as it facilitates truthful subjective evaluation …

? Suppose a manager's evaluation is private information. Justifying her evaluation is costly but limits the principal's scope … attributed to biased managers. I show that these effects occur in optimal contracts without any biased behavior. …

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. This paper studies incentive contracts with stochastic compensation, like …

-by-move data provide exceptionally detailed and precise information about decision times and decision quality, based on a … acquire information about decision alternatives with uncertain valuations. …

I show that deterministic dynamic contracts between a principal and an agent are always at least as profitable to the … correlation of stochastic contracts across periods that the usual restriction in the literature to deterministic contracts is …

-maximal information-gathering. Thus, optimal contracts eliminate private information but not market uncertainty; even though the latter … certifier can enable the seller to disclose her private information publicly, as well as gather additional market information … would be costless, it is suboptimal as it requires excessive information rents to the seller. Thus, market inefficiencies …