The paper studies a model of delegated search. The distribution of search revenues is unknown to the principal and has to be elicited from the agent in order to design the optimal search policy. At the same time, the search process is unobservable, requiring search to be self-enforcing. The two...

We study the effects of improvements in market transparency on eBay on seller exit and continuing sellers’ behavior. An improvement in market transparency by reducing strategic bias in buyer ratings led to a significant increase in buyer valuation especially of sellers rated poorly prior to...

Several empirical findings have challenged the traditional view on the trade-off between risk and incentives. By combining risk aversion and limited liability in a standard principal-agent model the empirical puzzle on the positive relationship between risk and incentives can be explained....

A standard tournament contract specifies only tournament prizes. If agents' performance is measured on a cardinal scale, the principal can complement the tournament contract by a gap which defines the minimum distance by which the best performing agent must beat the second best to receive the...

We consider a two-stage principal-agent model with limited liability in which a CEO is employed as agent to gather information about suitable merger targets and to manage the merged corporation in case of an acquisition. Our results show that the CEO systematically recommends targets with low...

Why does incentive pay often depend on subjective rather than objective performance evaluations? After all, subjective evaluations entail a credibility issue. While the most plausible explanation for this practice is lack of adequate objective measures, I argue that subjective evaluations might...

A unilateral policy intervention by a country (such as the introduction of an emission price) can induce firms to relocate to other countries. We analyze a dynamic game where a regulator offers contracts to avert relocation of a firm in each of two periods. The firm can undertake a...

While most market transactions are subject to strong incentives, transactions within Firms are often not incentivized. We offer an explanation for this observation based on envy among agents in an otherwise standard moral hazard model with multiple agents. Envious agents suffer if other agents...

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...

The paper studies procurement contracts with pre-project investigations in the presence of adverse selection and moral hazard. To model the procurer's roblem, we extend a standard sequential screening model to endogenous information acquisition with moral hazard. The optimal contract displays...