Informal contracting is widely spread, but what makes it work in the absence of institutional enforcement and repetition? According to game-theoretic models of social capital, informal relationships can help agents self-enforce contracts when third-party enforcement is not available, because...

We consider a two-period LEN-type agency problem. The principal needs to implement one out of two accounting systems. One emphasizes relevance, the other reliability. Both systems produce identical inter-temporally correlated signals. The relevant system reports an accounting signal in the...

We formulate and solve the problem of optimal mechanism-design by a principal facing adverse selection and moral hazard from different sources. The parties' decision problem is comprised of a publicly observable collective choice and a partially private social choice. As in agency with pure...

We study the design of contracts that incentivize experts to collect information and truthfully report it to a decision maker. We depart from most of the previous literature by assuming that the transfers cannot depend on the realized state or on the ex post payoff of the decision maker. The...

A decision-maker has to elicit information from informed multiple experts about a policy's value. The principal may prevent communication among the agents. However, it may be in the principal's interest to allow communication among them. I assume that communication allows synergies to emerge...

A decision-maker has to elicit information from multiple informed experts about a policy's value. The principal may prevent communication among agents. However, it may be in the principal's interest to allow communication among them. I assume that communication allows some synergies among...

We theoretically investigate the effect of public information — such as credit ratings and securities analysts' reports — on investor welfare in the context of delegated asset management. Specifically, we ask: does more precise public information increase investor welfare by decreasing an...

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...

We consider a principal-agent model with moral hazard where the agent's knowledge about the performance measure is ambiguous and he is averse towards ambiguity. We show that the principal may optimally provide no incentives or contract only on a subset of all informative performance measures....

This paper considers the canonical sequential screening model and shows that when the agent has an expost outside option, the principal does not benefit from eliciting the agent's information sequentially. Unlike in the standard model without expost outside options, the optimal contract is...