This paper studies the problem of a monopolistic platform which offers agents connection with one another. Agents have heterogeneous characteristics that are valued by some other agents and observed privately by the principal. The agents are privately informed about their heterogeneous...

This paper studies the problem of information revelation in a multi-stage tournament where the agents’ effort in each stage gives rise to a stochastic performance signal privately observed by the principal. The principal controls the agents’ effort incentive through the use of a feedback...

In the model there are two types of financial auditors with identical technology, one of which is endowed with a prior reputation for honesty. We characterize conditions under which there exists a “two-tier equilibrium” in which “reputable” auditors refuse bribes offered by clients for...

Despite widespread use in online transactions, rating systems only provide summary statistics of buyers' diverse opinions at best. To investigate the consequences of this coarse form of information aggregation, we consider a dynamic lemons market in which buyers share their evaluations...

In dynamic principal-agent relationships, it is sometimes observed that the agent's reward depends only on the final outcome. For example, a student's grade in a course quite often depends only on the final exam score, where the performance in the problem sets and the mid-term exam is ignored....

A principal acquires information about a shock and then discloses it to an agent. After the disclosure, the principal and agent each decide whether to take costly preparatory actions that yield benefits only when the shock strikes. The principal maximizes his expected payoff by controlling the...

In many facets of life, we often face competition with a multilayered structure in which different levels of competition take place simultaneously. In this paper, we propose a new class of tournament models, called multilayered tournaments, to capture this type of competitive environment. Among...

We consider a "tenure-clock problem" in which a principal may set a deadline by which she needs to evaluate an agent's ability and decides whether to promote him or not. We embed this problem in a continuous-time model with both hidden action and hidden information, where the principal must...

In this paper, we consider a dynamic signaling model of an R&D market in which a researcher can choose either a safe project (exploitation) or a risky project (exploration) at each instance. We argue that there are substantial efficiency gains from rewarding minor innovations above their social...

This paper studies a model of mechanism design with transfers where agents' preferences need not be quasilinear. In such a model, (1) we characterize dominant strategy incentive compatible mechanisms using a monotonicity property; (2) we establish a revenue uniqueness result: for every dominant...