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...

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 consumer's problem. This involves moral hazard because diagnosis effort and...

The paper analyzes the choice of organizational structure as solution to the trade-off between controlling behavior based on authority rights and minimizing costs for implementing high efforts. The analysis includes the owner of a firm, a top manager and two division heads. If it is more...

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...

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...

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...

In this paper we report on a principal-agent experiment where the principal can choose whether to rely on an unenforcable bonus contract or to combine the bonus contract with a fine if the agent's effort falls below a minimum standard. We show that most principals do not use the fine and that...

This paper analyzes the efficiency of team production when agents exhibit other regarding preferences. It is shown that full efficiency can be sustained as an equilibrium through a budget-balancing mechanism that punishes some randomly chosen agents if output falls short of efficient level but...