We examine the buyer-seller problem under different levels of commitment. The seller is informed of the quality of the good, which affects both his cost and the buyer's valuation, but the buyer is not. We characterize the allocations that can be achieved through mechanisms in which, unlike with...

We present a model of delegation with moral hazard. A principal delegates a decision to an agent, who affects the distribution of the state of the world by exerting costly and unobservable effort. The principal faces a trade-off between (i) granting the agent discretion, so he can adapt the...