This paper analyzes how on-the-job search (OJS) by an agent impacts the moral hazard problem in a repeated principal-agent relationship. OJS is found to constitute a source of agency costs because efficient search incentives require that the agent receives all gains from trade. Further, the...

This paper analyzes how on-the-job search (OJS) by an agent impacts the moral hazard problem in a repeated principal-agent relationship. OJS is found to constitute a source of agency costs because efficient search incentives require that the agent receives all gains from trade. Further, the...

In the presence of a time-inconsistency problem with optimal agency contracts, we show that competitive markets implement allocations that Pareto dominate those achieved by a benevolent planner, they induce strictly more effort, and they sometimes make the commitment problem disappear entirely....

This paper studies repeated games where the time of repetitions of the stage game is not known or controlled by the players. Many economic situations of interest where players repeatedly interact share this feature, players do not know exactly when is the next time they will be called to play...

This paper studies frequent monitoring in a simple infinitely repeated game with imperfect public information and discounting, where players observe the state of a continuous time Brownian process at moments in time of length Δ. It shows that efficient strongly symmetric perfect public...

The health care industry in some countries displays a gated structure. Rather than approaching a specialist directly, a patient will first seek a referral from a general practitioner. We provide one possible explanation for such an industry structure. If the outcome of treatment depends on the...

This paper studies a novel dynamic principle agent setting with moral hazard and adverse selection (persistent as well as repeated). In the model an expert whose skills are his private information, faces a finite sequence of tasks, one after the other. Each task's level of difficulty is an...

I examine optimal managerial compensation and turnover policy in a principal-agent model in which the firm output is serially correlated over time. The model captures a learning-by-doing feature: higher effort by the manager increases the quality of the match between the firm and the manager in...

We present a dynamic general equilibrium model with heterogeneous firms. Owners of the firms delegate investment decisions to managers, whose consumption and investment are private information. We solve the optimal incentive compatible contracts and characterize the implied firm dynamics....

Recent empirical studies conclude that small firms have higher but more variable growth rates than large firms. To explore the effect of this size-dependence regularity on moral hazard and investment, we develop a continuous-time agency model with time-varying firm size. Firm size is a diffusion...