When a principal’s monitoring information is private (non-verifiable), the agent should be concerned that the principal could misrepresent the information to reduce the agent’s wage or collect a monetary penalty. Restoring credibility may lead to an extreme waste of resources - the so-called...

An agent may manipulate information when transmitting it to the principal. A direct response to this problem is to verify the information. The paper explores a situation where the principal engages in information verification herself or alternatively delegates it to the agent. The paper finds...

We consider an adverse selection model in which the agent can gather private information before the principal offers the contract. There are two scenarios. In scenario I, information gathering is a hidden action, while in scenario II, the principal observes the agent's information gathering...

We study a two-stage agency model in which the players take the role of the principal in turn. In the first stage, the board of the firm decides payment to the manager to induce him to set up and implement a project. In the second stage, the board evaluates the project to learn its value, and...

A principal who has a project with uncertain returns must retain and incentivize an agent using promise of future payments and information control. The agent's effort produces output and facilitates information gathering. The principal controls the informativeness of the agent's effort by...

Most firms issue financial assets such as debt or equity (e.g. bonds or stock) to outside investors. While these financial assets differ greatly in their characteristics, their diversity has received little attention in the literature. Filling this important gap in the literature, this paper...

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...

We show that firms may benefit from allowing some earnings management, because it can make noisy signals more informative. We model a firm that cannot observe a manager's cost of effort, her effort choice, and whether she manipulated a publicly observable signal. An optimal contract links...

Abstract An asset owner designs an asset-backed security and a signal about its value. After privately observing the signal, he sells the security to the monopolistic liquidity supplier. Any optimal signal structure guarantees the security sale and commits the issuer not to learn too positive...

A monopolistic seller is marketing a good to a customer whose willingness to pay is determined by both his private type and the “quality.” The seller can design a menu of both prices and experiments - that reveal information about quality. We show that the optimal mechanism features both...