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...

An important problem in electronic commerce is that of finding optimal pricing mechanisms to sell a single item when the number of buyers is random and they arrive over time. In this paper we combine ideas from auction theory and recent work on pricing with strategic consumers to derive the...

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...