We study managerial incentive provision under moral hazard in an environment where growth opportunities arrive stochastically over time and taking them requires a change of management. The firm faces a trade-off between the benefit of always having a manager able to seize new opportunities and...

We analyze the effects of lower bounds on wages on optimal job design within firms. In our model, two tasks affect firm value and an imperfect performance measure. Due to cost advantages of specialization, assigning the tasks to different agents is efficient. Yet a sufficiently large wage floor...

We analyze optimal contracts in a hierarchy consisting of a principal, a supervisor and an agent. The supervisor is either neutral or altruistic towards the agent, but his preferences are private information. In a model with two supervisor types, we find that the optimal contract may be very...

We study the screening problem of a firm that needs to hire a worker to produce output and that observes neither the productive ability nor the intrinsic motivation of the job applicant. We completely characterize the set of optimal contracts according to whether motivation or ability is the...

This paper examines the effect of imperfect labor market competition on the efficiency of compensation schemes in a setting with moral hazard and risk-averse agents, who have private information on their productivity. Two vertically differentiated firms compete for agents by offering contracts...

I examine incentive contracting with an agent who disagrees with the principal and creates organizational frictions when the actual performance evaluation and compensation fall short of what he thinks he should earn. Results show that seemingly rigid policies, such as long-term performance...

Problems involving hidden action are typically solved with incentive contracts. However, they can be solved more efficiently if the agent reliably tells the truth about hidden action. In this paper, we parameterize the agent with an exogenous lying cost. If the cost is high enough, the agent can...

We analyze a dynamic principal-agent problem with moral hazard and private learning. Each period the agent faces a choice between two actions: a safe action with known returns (exploitation) and a costly risky action with unknown returns (experimentation). We explicitly characterize the cheapest...

The extant literature has used measurements of CEO risk-taking incentives which do not include the effects of termination provisions such as severance agreements. This paper provides a general form model that allows for the valuation and computation of CEO compensation structures including...

Principals seek to enter into a productive relationship with agents by posting mechanisms in a market with competitive search. A mechanism includes an incentive contract if the meeting is bilateral, and an ex post bidding process, in which agents make contract offers, if several agents meet the...