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...

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...

I analyze common agency games in which the principals, and possibly the agent, have private information. I distinguish between games in which the principals delegate the final decisions to the agent, and games in which they retain some decision power after offering their mechanisms. I show that,...

When the information used by a principal to monitor an agent is private, and thus non-verifiable by a third party, the principal has a credibility issue with the agent. The agent should be concerned that the principal could misrepresent the information in order to collect a monetary penalty from...

This paper considers general games in which multiple informed principals simultaneously compete to influence the decisions of a common agent. It shows that we can characterize all outcomes of any game in which principals delegate the final decisions to the agent using arbitrary mechanisms, by...

We develop a dynamic principal-agent model to show how imperfect public information and asymmetric beliefs about payoff-relevant parameters, agency conflicts, and the agent's implicit incentives to influence the principal's posterior beliefs through his unobservable actions interact to affect...

We develop a dynamic principal-agent model to show how imperfect public information and asymmetric beliefs about payoff-relevant parameters, agency conflicts, and the agent's implicit incentives to influence the principal's posterior beliefs through his unobservable actions interact to affect...

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...

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...

This paper studies stylised markets with asymmetric information. When the market is modelled as a standard signalling game, inefficient outcomes arise due to the arbitrariness of off-the-equilibrium path beliefs. Such inefficient outcomes are shown not to arise in a novel game that combines...