Objective measures of performance are seldom perfect. In response, incentive contracts often include important subjective components that mitigate incentive distortions caused by imperfect objective measures. This paper explores the combined use of subjective and objective performance measures...

This paper studies the ability of an agent and a principal to achieve the first-best outcome when the agent invests in an asset that has greater value if owned by the principal than by the agent. When contracts can be renegotiated, a well-known danger is that the principal can hold up the agent,...

This paper shows that the informativeness principle, as originally formulated by Holmstrom (1979), does not hold if the first-order approach is invalid. We introduce a "generalized informativeness principle" that takes into account non-local incentive constraints and holds generically, even...

Recent work has shown that, in the presence of moral hazard, balanced budget Nash equilibria in groups are not pareto-optimal. This work shows that when agents misperceive the effects of their actions on the joint outcome, there exist a set of sharing rules which balance the budget and lead to a...

There are a large number of cases where corruption has been discovered investigating levels of consumption that appear to be hard to justify. Yet, in the standard moral hazard model withholding of effort by the agent is not observable to the principal. We argue that this assumption has to be...

Deadlines and penalties are widely used to incentivize effort. We model how these incentive contracts affect the work rate and time taken in a procurement setting, characterizing the efficient contract design. Using new micro-level data on Minnesota highway construction contracts that includes...

We study the problem of an investor who buys an equity stake in an entrepreneurial venture, under the assumption that the former cannot monitor the latter's operations. The dynamics implied by the optimal incentive scheme is rich and quite different from that induced by other models of repeated...

This paper presents new evidence on why unemployment insurance (UI) benefits affect search behavior and develops a simple method of calculating the welfare gains from UI using this evidence. I show that 60 percent of the increase in unemployment durations caused by UI benefits is due to a...