Purpose This paper aims to argue that Economics is not a neutral science. Design/methodology/approach Post-structuralist perspective of Lyotard (1984), alongside the Pragmatics of Searle (1979) and Travis (1981) are useful for analyzing enunciations in mainstream Economics. Findings Economists...

Should principals explain and justify their evaluations? In this paper the principal's evaluation is private information, but she can provide some justifications by sending a costly message. Indeed, it is optimal for the principal to explain her evaluation to the agent if and only if the...

In this paper, I study the dynamic delegation problem in a principal-agent model wherein an agent privately observes a persistently evolving state, and the principal commits to actions based on the agent's reported state. There are no transfers. While the agent has state-independent preferences,...

Should principals explain and justify their evaluations? In this paper the principal's evaluation is private information, but she can provide justification by sending a costly cheap-talk message. I show that the principal explains her evaluation to the agent if the evaluation turns out to be...

Should principals explain and justify their evaluations? Suppose the principal's evaluation is private information, but she can provide justification by sending a costly cheap-talk message. If she does not provide justification, her message space is restricted, but the message is costless. I...

This paper introduces private sender information into a sender-receiver game of Bayesian persuasion with monotonic sender preferences. I derive properties of increasing differences related to the precision of signals and use these to fully characterize the set of equilibria robust to the...

This paper models two key roles of subjective performance evaluations: their incentive role and their feedback role. The paper shows that the feedback role makes subjective pay feasible even without repeated interaction, as long as there exists some verifiable measure of performance. It also...

We study a model of cheap talk with one substantive assumption: The sender's preferences are state independent. Our main observation is that such a sender gains credibility by degrading self-serving information. Using this observation, we examine the sender's benefits from communication, assess...

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...

An entrepreneur contracts with a consultant, who is protected by limited liability, to supply information about the state of a project prior to investing in it. For a given level of investment, a good project succeeds with higher probability than a bad one. The entrepreneur makes an upfront...