Oliver Hart and Bengt Holmström were awarded the 2016 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for their fundamental contributions to contract theory. This article offers a short summary and discussion of their path breaking work.

We study a moral hazard model in which the output is stochastically determined by both the agent's hidden effort and an uncertain state of the world. We investigate how the contractibility of the ex-post realization of the state affects the principal's incentive to provide information. While...

The standard economic analysis of the insured-insurer relationship under moral hazard postulates a simplistic setup that hardly explains the many features of an insurance contract. We extend this setup to include the situation that the insured was facing at the time of the accident and the...

After a contract is signed, contracting partners may engage in opportunistic behavior that circumvents the original intention of the agreement governing their business relationship (i.e. complying with the letter but not the spirit of the contract). We use an incomplete contracts approach to...

This paper argues that academics, politicians, and the media have six commonly held but misguided beliefs about corporate governance. While Armstrong, Guay, and Weber (2010) discuss some of these misconceptions, a wider recognition that these beliefs are actually “myths” is important. They...

This paper develops a positive model of informal contracting in which rewards and punishments are not determined by an ex ante optimal plan but instead express the ex post moral sentiments of the arbitrating party. We consider a subjective performance evaluation problem in which a principal can...

In the hold-up problem incomplete contracts cause the proceeds of relation specific investments to be allocated by ex-post bargaining. The present paper investigates the efficiency of incomplete contracts if individuals have heterogeneous preferences implying heterogeneous bargaining behavior...

We analyze the optimal allocation of authority in an organization whose members have conflicting preferences. One party has decision-relevant private information, and the party who obtains authority decides in a self-interested way. As a novel element in the literature on decision rights, we...