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...

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...

Incomplete information is an obstacle to deal-making. Information problems also exist as to ongoing matters in the parties’ relationship. That this is so is well known. But attention has focused largely on a subset of information problems where there is agreement on what the information is and...

This paper proposes a general competing mechanism game of incomplete information where a mechanism allows its designer to send a message to himself at the same time agents send messages. This paper introduces a notion of robust equilibrium. If each agent’s payoff function is separable with...

In many contracting settings, actions costly to one party but with no direct benefits to the other (money-burning) may be part of the explicit or implicit contract. A leading example is bureaucratic procedures in an employer-employee relationship. We study a model of delegation with an informed...

Supplementary Appendix to "Delegation and Nonmonetary Incentives."The paper "Delegation and Nonmonetary Incentives" to which these Appendices apply is available at the following URL: "http://ssrn.com/abstract=2700821" http://ssrn.com/abstract=2700821

We consider multiple-principal multiple-agent models of moral hazard: Principals compete through mechanisms in the presence of agents who take unobservable actions. In this context, we provide a rationale for restricting principals to make use of simple mechanisms, which correspond to direct...

We explore the strategic equivalence of the delegated menu contracting procedure in pure-strategy multi-agency games under ex post equilibrium. Our model setup permits "full-blown interdependence," including information externality, contract externality, correlated types, and primitive...

In an ongoing relationship of delegated decision making, a principal consults a biased agent to assess projects' returns. In equilibrium, the principal allows future bad projects to reward fiscal restraint, but cannot commit to indefinite rewards. We characterize equilibrium payoffs (at fixed...