In this paper, we show that whenever the agent's outside option is nonzero, the optimal contract in the continuous-time principal-agent model of Sannikov (2008) is reflective at the lower bound. This means the agent is never terminated or retired after poor performance. Instead, the agent is...

We study a continuous-time version of the optimal risk-sharing problem with one-sided commitment. In the optimal contract, the agent's consumption is non-decreasing and depends only on the maximal level of the agent's income realized to date. In the complete-markets implementation of the optimal...