The standard ex post type of collusion is a supervisor-agent agreement to misrepresent the outcome of supervision. Under ex ante collusion the agent makes a side transfer to the supervisor, who, in return, stops monitoring the agent's productivity. Extending Tirole's [1986] model of hierarchy to...

We introduce ex-ante collusion whereby the supervisor stops monitoring for a transfer payment from the agent, in addition to ex-post collusion following the monitoring outcome. Extending a well-known model of hierarchy, we study the determinants of ex-ante collusion and show that, depending on...