We study optimal direct mechanisms for a credence goods expert who can be altruistic or spiteful. The expert has private information about her distributional preferences and possibly also about her customer's needs. We introduce a method that allows the customer to offer separate contracts to...

A standard tournament contract specifies only tournament prizes. If agents' performance is measured on a cardinal scale, the principal can complement the tournament contract by a gap which defines the minimum distance by which the best performing agent must beat the second best to receive the...

The paper studies a model of delegated search. The distribution of search revenues is unknown to the principal and has to be elicited from the agent in order to design the optimal search policy. At the same time, the search process is unobservable, requiring search to be self-enforcing. The two...

We conducted six treatments of a standard moral hazard experiment with hidden action. All treatments had identical Nash equilibria. However, the behavior in all treatments and periods was inconsistent with established agency theory (Nash equilibrium). In the early periods of the experiment,...

In a multi-agent setting, individuals often compare own performance with that of their peers. These comparisons influence agents incentives and lead to a noncooperative game, even if the agents have to complete independent tasks. I show that depending on the interplay of the peer effects, agents...

The paper studies a model of delegated search. The distribution of search revenues is unknown to the principal and has to be elicited from the agent in order to design the optimal search policy. At the same time, the search process is unobservable, requiring search to be self-enforcing. The two...

We extend the theoretical model of external corporate financing to the case when the buyers of the borrowing firm may default during the financing period. In our setup there is an asymmetric information and hence moral hazard between the lender and the borrower concerning the effrts of the...

We study a two-period dynamic principal agent model in which two agents with different unobservable abilities compete in a contest for a single prize. A risk-neutral principal can affect the outcome of the contest by dividing a given budget between agents in each period and her net payoff...

We show that contracting in agency with voluntary participation may involve incentives for the agent's abstention. Their provision alters the optimality criteria in the principal's decision-making, further distorts the mechanism, and may lead to breakdown of contracting in circumstances where...

We study a discrete-time model of repeated moral hazard without commitment. In every period, a principal finances a project, choosing the scale of the project and a contingent payment plan for an agent, who has the opportunity to appropriate the returns of a successful project unbeknownst the...