We analyze the optimal combination of promotion tournaments and individual performance pay in an employment relationship. An agent's effort is non-observable and he has private information about his suitability for promotion. We find that the principal does not provide individual incentives if...

A popular view of limited liability in financial contracting is that it is the result of societal preferences agnainst excessive penalties. the view of most financial economists is instead that limited liability emerged as an optimal institution when, in the absence of a clear limit on economic...

In this paper the problem of optimal derivative design, profit maximization and risk minimization under adverse selection when multiple agencies compete for the business of a continuum of heterogenous agents is studied. In contrast with the principal-agent models that are extended within, here...

This note reconsiders communication between an informed expert and an uninformed decision maker with a strategic mediator in a discrete Crawford and Sobel (1982) setting. We show that a strategic mediator may improve communication even when he is biased into the same direction as the expert. The...

Within a standard three-tier regulatory model, a benevolent principal delegates to a regulatory agency two tasks: the supervision of the firm's (two-type) costs and the arrangement of a pricing mechanism. The agency may have an incentive to manipulate information to the principal to share the...

Strategic delegation to an independent regulator with a pure consumer standard improves dynamic regulation by mitigating ratchet effects associated with short term contracting. A consumer standard alleviates the regulator's myopic temptation to raise output after learning the firm is...

Interactions between players with private information and opposed interests are often prone to bad advice and inefficient outcomes, e.g. markets for financial or health care services. In a deception game we investigate experimentally which factors could improve advice quality. Besides advisor...

We examine optimal managerial compensation and turnover policy in a principal-agent model in which the firm output is serially correlated over time. The model captures a learning-by-doing feature: higher effort by the manager increases the quality of the match between the firm and the manager in...

We analyze a novel feedback mechanism between market and funding liquidity that causes self-fulfilling liquidity dry-ups. Financial firms facing funding withdrawals have an incentive to acquire information about their assets. Those with good assets gain by resorting to outside liquidity sources...

We study ex post information rents in sequential screening models where the agent receives private ex ante and ex post information. The principal has to pay ex post information rents for preventing the agent to coordinate lies about his ex ante and ex post information. When the agent's ex ante...