This article studies how delay in contracting depends on an exogenous signal. The agent whose cost is his private information may produce in the first period or be delayed until the second period. A signal about the cost of the agent is available between the two periods. The quality of the good...

This paper studies informational externalities between contracts. Two principals (for instance the governments of two neighbouring countries) deal with two different agents (for instance a railway company in each country). If, in the first period, an agent refuses the contract offered by his...

We study a moral hazard model in which the output is stochastically determined by both the agent's hidden effort and an uncertain state of the world. We investigate how the contractibility of the ex-post realization of the state affects the principal's incentive to provide information. While...

I consider an investor who can acquire a costly signal about an entrepreneur's project. The investor's problem is that uninformed investors can compete to provide funding and his contract offer conveys information to the entrepreneur about project payoffs, affecting the attractiveness of the...

Consider an agent (manager, artist, etc.) who has imperfect private information about his productivity. At the beginning of his career (period 1, short runʺ), the agent chooses among publicly observable actions that generate imperfect signals of his productivity. The actions can be ranked...

We study a model of adverse selection, hard and soft information, and mentalizing ability-the human capacity to represent others' intentions, knowledge, and beliefs. By allowing for a continuous range of different information types, as well as for different means of acquiring information, we...

Before embarking on a project, a principal must often rely on an agent to learn about its profitability. We model this learning as a two-armed bandit problem and highlight the interaction between learning (experimentation) and production. We derive the optimal contract for both experimentation...

We study the design of monitoring in dynamic settings with moral hazard. An agent (e.g. a firm) benefits from reputation for quality, and a principal (e.g. a regulator) can learn the agent's quality via costly inspections. Monitoring plays two roles: an incentive role, because outcomes of...

This paper analyzes the optimal contract for a consumer to procure a credence good from an expert when (i) the expert might misrepresent his private information about the consumer’s need, (ii) the expert might not choose the requested service since his choice of treatment is non-observable,...

We solve a long-term contracting problem with symmetric uncertainty about the agent's quality, and a hidden action of the agent. As information about quality accumulates, incentives become easier to provide because the agent has less room to manipulate the principal's beliefs. This result is...