We explore the optimal delegation of decision rights by a principal to a better informed but biased agent. In an infinitely repeated game a long-lived principal faces a series of short-lived agents. Every period they play a cheap talk game ala Crawford and Sobel (1982) with constant bias,...

In an ongoing relationship of delegated decision making, a principal consults a biased agent to assess projects' returns. In equilibrium, the principal allows future bad projects to reward fiscal restraint, but cannot commit to indefinite rewards. We characterize equilibrium payoffs (at fixed...

We explore the optimal delegation of decision rights by a principal to a better informed but biased agent. In an infinitely repeated game a long lived principal faces a series of short lived agents. Every period they play a cheap talk game ala Crawford and Sobel (1982) with constant bias,...

This paper views authority as the right to undertake decisions that impose externalities on other members of the organization. When only decision rights can be contractually assigned to one of the organization's stakeholders, the optimal assignment minimizes the resulting inefficiencies by...

A principal chooses one of n ≥ 2 projects or an outside option. An agent is privately informed about the projects' benefits and shares the principal's preferences except for not internalizing her value from the outside option. We show that strategic communication is characterized by...

We study the design of monitoring in dynamic settings with moral hazard. An agent (e.g. a firm) benefits from reputation for quality, and a principal (e.g. a regulator) can learn the agent's quality via costly inspections. Monitoring plays two roles: an incentive role, because outcomes of...

We explore the conditions under which the "first-order approach" (FO-approach) can be used to characterize profit maximizing contracts in dynamic principal-agent models. The FO-approach works when the resulting FO-optimal contract satisfies a particularly strong form of monotonicity in types, a...

In a continuous-time setting, we study the design of a dynamic contract between a government and a private entity, wherein the latter commits to pay the government in return for the exclusive right to sell a service by operating a public facility. Private revenues are modelled as depending on...

Regularly rotating agents between jobs in firms may lower the ratchet effect. Specifically, job rotation could disentangle the influence of current performance on agents' future incentives. In this paper, we conduct a controlled experiment to test the effectiveness of job rotation in eliminating...