This article studies a principal-agent problem with discrete outcome and effort space. The principal and the agent are risk neutral and the latter is subject to limited liability. For a given monitoring technology, we consider the maximum possible ratio between the first best social welfare to...

This article studies a principal-agent problem with discrete outcome and effort level spaces. The principal and the agent are risk neutral and the latter is subject to limited liability. We consider the ratio between the first-best social welfare and the social welfare arising from the...

We discuss the problem of sequencing precedence-constrained jobs on a single machine to minimize the average weighted completion time. This problem has attracted much attention in the mathematical programming community since Sidney's pioneering work in 1975. We look at the problem from a...