Asymmetric information is widely supposed to impair the functioning of markets. We show that the presence of competition may invalidate this intuition. Consider a market in which principals compete for attracting heterogeneous agents by offering contracts. Suppose contracts are exclusive, and...

This paper investigates how additional ex post private information by the agent affects the equilibrium outcome of the monopolistic screening model. In general, the principal always weakly benefits when the agent receives additional private information after the contracting stage. Instead, both...

In an ongoing organization, such as a large law partnership firm, employees are motivated not only by current rewards but also by the prospect of promotion, and the opportunity to make the rules in the future. This leads to a recursive contract design problem in an overlapping generations...