Should principals explain and justify their evaluations? In this paper the principal's evaluation is private information, but she can provide justification by sending a costly cheap-talk message. I show that the principal explains her evaluation to the agent if the evaluation turns out to be...

We study relative performance of stochastic and deterministic mechanisms in a principal-agent model with hidden information and no monetary transfers. We present an example in which stochastic mechanisms perform strictly better than deterministic ones and can implement any outcome arbitrarily...