We examine the nature of contracts that optimally reward innovations in a risky environment, when the innovator is privately informed about the quality of her innovation and must engage an agent to develop it. We model the innovator as a principal who has private but imperfect information about...

Motivated by markets for ''expertise,'' we study a bandit model where a principal chooses between a safe and risky arm. A strategic agent controls the risky arm and privately knows whether its type is high or low. Irrespective of type, the agent wants to maximize duration of experimentation with...

This paper studies experimentally the value of private information in strictly competitive interactions with asymmetric information. We implement in the laboratory three examples from the class of zero-sum repeated games with incomplete information on one side and perfect monitoring. The stage...

Informational asymmetries abound in economic decision making and often provide an incentive for deception through telling a lie or misrepresenting information. In this paper I use a cheap-talk sender-receiver experiment to show that telling the truth should be classified as deception too if the...

Does providing information improve citizens' perception about government transparency? Does all information matter the same for shaping perceptions about the government? This paper addresses these questions in the context of an online randomized survey experiment conducted in Argentina. Results...

A government agency wants an infrastructure-based public service to be provided. Our experimental study compares two different modes of provision. In a public–private partnership, the two tasks of building the infrastructure and operating it are delegated to one private contractor (a...

We use experiments to test comparative statics predictions of canonical tournament theory. Both the roles of principal and agent are populated by human subjects, allowing us to test predictions for both incentive responses and optimal tournament design. Consistent with theory, we observed an...

We investigate whether and how social ties affect performance in teams by implementing a field experiment in which a sample of undergraduate students are randomly assigned to either teams composed by friends or teams composed by individuals not linked by friendship relationships. Students...

Before embarking on a project, a principal must often rely on an agent to learn about its profitability. We model this learning as a two-armed bandit problem and highlight the interaction between learning (experimentation) and production. We derive the optimal contract for both experimentation...

Before embarking on a project, a principal must often rely on an agent to learn about its profitability. We model this learning as a two-armed bandit problem and highlight the interaction between learning (experimentation) and production. We derive the optimal contract for both experimentation...