We study a setting in which one or two agents conduct research on behalf of a principal. The agents' success depends on effort and the choice of a research technology that is uncertain with respect to its quality. A single agent has no incentive to deviate from the principal's preferred...

A unilateral policy intervention by a country (such as the introduction of an emission price) can induce firms to relocate to other countries. We analyze a dynamic game where a regulator offers contracts to avert relocation of a firm in each of two periods. The firm can undertake a...

In a globalized economy, firms move production to other countries without turning a hair. A local policy maker who seeks to avert relocation faces a dynamic problem - incentivizing the firm to remain in its home country today does not guarantee that the firm also stays in the future. We...

This paper investigates relational incentive contracts with continuous, privately-observed agent types that are persistent over time. With fixed agent types, full separation is not possible when continuation equilibrium payoffs following revelation are on the Pareto frontier of attainable...

The marginal cost of effort often increases as effort is exerted. In a dynamic moral hazard setting, dynamically increasing costs create information asymmetry. This paper characterizes the optimal contract and helps explain the popular yet thus far puzzling use of non-linear incentives, for...

We examine optimal managerial compensation and turnover policy in a principal-agent model in which the firm output is serially correlated over time. The model captures a learning-by-doing feature: higher effort by the manager increases the quality of the match between the firm and the manager in...

This paper studies the optimal contract for a risk-neutral agency with limited liability. We introduce a novel formulation of the model, in which the contract design problem reduces to a problem of constructing the distribution function of a random variable. This formulation directly balances...

In this paper, we show that whenever the agent's outside option is nonzero, the optimal contract in the continuous-time principal-agent model of Sannikov (2008) is reflective at the lower bound. This means the agent is never terminated or retired after poor performance. Instead, the agent is...

This paper considers dynamic moral hazard settings, in which the consequences of the agent's actions is not precisely understood. In a new continuous-time principal-agent model with drift ambiguity, the agent's unobservable action translates to drift set for the diffusion processes that describe...

We analyze optimal contracts in a hierarchy consisting of a principal, a supervisor and an agent. The supervisor is either neutral or altruistic towards the agent, but his preferences are private information. In a model with two supervisor types, we find that the optimal contract may be very...