This paper analyzes the principal-agent relationship between a plaintiff and his or her lawyer when the lawyer's investment in discovery is private information. The plaintiff uses the level of the contingency fee and potentially also restrictions on settlements to guide the lawyer's...

We analyze a dynamic model of informed trading where a shareholder accumulates shares in an anonymous market and then expends costly effort to change the firm value. We find that equilibrium prices are affected by the position accumulated by the shareholder, because the level of effort...

We study the optimal dynamics of incentives for a manager whose ability to generate cash .ows changes stochastically with time and is his private information. We show that, in general, the power of incentives (or "pay for performance") may either increase or decrease with tenure. However, risk...

Consider a principal-agent relationship in which more effort by the agent raises the likelihood of success. Does rewarding success, i.e., paying a bonus, increase effort in this case? I find that bonuses have not only an incentive but also an income effect. Overall, bonuses paid for success may...

We examine a situation where efforts on different tasks positively affect production but are not separately verifiable and where the manager (principal) and the worker (agent) have different ideas about how production should be carried out: agents prefer a less efficient way of production. We...