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...

We examine the nature of contracts that optimally reward innovations in a risky environment, when the innovator is privately informed about the quality of her innovation and must engage an agent to develop it. We model the innovator as a principal who has private but imperfect information about...

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 consider how a principal can optimally outsource information acquisition to an agent in a dynamic environment when the principal can observe neither the agent's effort of collecting information nor signal realizations. Neither initial transaction nor interim payments are allowed to prevent...

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...

How does the prospect of sale affect the seller's incentive to investigate — to acquire socially valuable information about the asset? How do the disclosure rules of contract law influence the investigation decision? Shavell (1994) showed that, if sellers and buyers are symmetrically informed,...

This paper generalizes a conceptual insight in dynamic contracting with quasilin- ear payoffs: the principal does not need to pay any information rents for extract- ing the agent’s “new” private information obtained after signing the contract. This is shown in a general model in which the...

This paper studies a marriage market with two-sided information asymmetry in which the gains from marriage are stochastic. Contracts specify divisions of ex-post realized marital surplus. I first study a game in which one side of the matching market offers contracts. I show that when expected...

We consider the problem of a principal who wishes to contract with a privately informed agent and is not able to commit to not renegotiating any mechanism. That is, we allow the principal, after observing the outcome of a mechanism to renegotiate the resulting contract without cost by proposing...