Delegated contracting describes a widely observable agency mode where a top principal, who has no direct access to a productive downstream agent, hires an intermediary to forward a sub-contract with specified output targets and payments. The principal makes the payment to the intermediary...

I show that it is optimal to separate non-benevolent regulators when regulated projects are large. Separation prevents regulators from coordinating to appropriate all of the agent's informational rent when they know the type of the latter; therefore, there is a trade-off between saving on...

We analyze a principal-supervisor-two-agent hierarchy with soft information. The supervisor may be inefficient such that a noisy signal on the agents’ effort levels is observed. On one hand, the agents require risk premiums to work due to the noisy signal. On the other hand, the supervisor and...