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...

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....

In Spence's (1973) signaling by education model and in many of its extensions, firms can only infer workers' productivities from their education choices. In reality, firms also use sophisticated pre-employment auditing to learn workers' productivities. We characterize the trade-offs between...

We analyze a competitive labor market in which workers signal their productivities through education à la Spence (1973), and firms have the option of auditing to learn workers’ productivities. Audits are costly and non–contractible. We characterize the trade–offs between signaling by...

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...