We study a setting wherein a divisional manager undertakes personally costly effort to improve the profitability of an investment project. The manager's choice of innovation effort is subject to a holdup problem because of the ex post opportunism on the part of headquarters. We analyze and...

We develop a structural model to quantitatively analyze the effects of asymmetric beliefs and agency conflicts on capital structure. Capital structure reflects the dynamic tradeoff between the positive incentive effects of managerial optimism and the negative effects of risk-sharing costs....

We characterize the optimal dynamic mechanism for capital budgeting and managerial compensation. The division manager privately observes the project productivity at each point in time as well as an initial signal that governs the productivity evolution. We show that the optimal allocation can be...

This paper studies the problem of delegating the allocation of resources across multiple categories to an agent who has better information on their benefits. It focuses on a tractable, natural class of delegation policies that impose a floor or cap on the allocation to each category, a...

Moral hazard and disagreement are important economic frictions. How do their individual effects on economic behavior differ and how do these frictions interact when operating together? This paper addresses these questions by developing a canonical model of disagreement (generated by...

We consider resource allocation within an organisation and show how delegation bears on moral hazard and adverse selection when agents have a preference for autonomy. Agents may care about autonomy for reasons of job-satisfaction, status or greater reputation when performing well under autonomy....

An entrepreneur needs a lender's capital input to finance a project. The entrepreneur, who is privately informed about the project environment, provides a labor input (effort). Capital and labor are perfect complements. We show that the entrepreneur may optimally distort the project's...

Ortner et al. (Manage. Account. Res. 36(1):43–50, 2017) propose the State-Contingent Relative Benefit Cost Allocation Scheme as an incentive system for risky investment decisions. The note at hand reveals the information distribution implicitly assumed within the framework of this study. Based...

We derive the optimal compensation contract in a principal-agent setting in which outcome is used to provide incentives for both effort and risky investments. To motivate investment, optimal compensation entails rewards for high as well as low outcomes, and it is increasing at the mean outcome...

We consider a problem where an uninformed principal makes a timing decision interacting with an informed but biased agent. Because time is irreversible, the direction of the bias crucially affects the agent's ability to credibly communicate information. When the agent favors late...