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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

This paper studies the optimal refund mechanism when an uninformed buyer can privately acquire information about his valuation over time. In principle, a refund mechanism can specify the odds that the seller requires the product returned while issuing a (partial) refund, which we call stochastic...

In Spence's (1973) signaling by education model and in many of its extensions, firms can only infer workers' productivities from their education choices. In reality, firms also use sophisticated pre-employment auditing to learn workers' productivities. We characterize the trade-offs between...

In Spence's (1973) signaling by education model and in many of its extensions, firms can only infer workers' productivities from their education choices. In reality, firms also use sophisticated pre-employment auditing to learn workers' productivities. We characterize the trade-offs between...