This paper analyzes the optimal contract for a consumer to procure a credence good from an expert when (i) the expert might misrepresent his private information about the consumer’s need, (ii) the expert might not choose the requested service since his choice of treatment is non-observable,...

I show that deterministic dynamic contracts between a principal and an agent are always at least as profitable to the principal as stochastic ones, if the so-called first-order approach in dynamic mechanism design is satisfied. The principal commits, while the agent's type evolution follows a...

We study contracting between a consumer and an expert. The expert can invest in diagnosis to obtain a noisy signal about whether a low-cost service is sufficient or whether a high-cost treatment is required to solve the consumerś problem. This involves moral hazard because diagnosis effort and...

Oliver Hart and Bengt Holmström were awarded the 2016 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for their fundamental contributions to contract theory. This article offers a short summary and discussion of their path breaking work.

This paper explores the optimal provision of dynamic incentives for employees with reciprocal preferences. Building on the presumption that a relational contract can establish a norm of reciprocity, I show that generous upfront wages that activate an employee’s reciprocal preferences are more...

This paper studies a principal-agent relation in which the principal's private information about the agent's effort choice is more accurate than a noisy public performance measure. For some contingencies the optimal contract has to specify ex post inefficiencies in the form of inefficient...

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....

We analyze the optimal allocation of authority in an organization whose members have conflicting preferences. One party has decision-relevant private information, and the party who obtains authority decides in a self-interested way. As a novel element in the literature on decision rights, we...

Consider managers evaluating their employees' performances. Should managers justify their subjective evaluations? Suppose a manager's evaluation is private information. Justifying her evaluation is costly but limits the principal's scope for distorting her evaluation of the employee. I show that...

Using a new experimental design, we compare how subjects form beliefs in an investor-client setup under varying degrees of liability. Our results reflect the importance of social preferences when making investment decisions for others. We show that when investors have no liability, those with...