This paper studies the effects of the signal available before a standard Baron-Myerson contracting takes place. It shows that, while the principal's profits increase with the quality of the signal, the agent's rent also increases if the signal concerns the realizations where the principal is...

We characterize optimal selling protocols/equilibria of a game in which an Agent first puts hidden effort to acquire information and then transacts with a Firm that uses this information to take a decision. We determine the equilibrium payoffs that maximize incentives to acquire information. Our...

An Agent who owns information that is potentially valuable to a Firm bargains for its sale, without commitment and certification possibilities, short of disclosing it. We propose a model of gradual persuasion and show how gradualism helps mitigate the hold-up problem (that the Firm would not pay...

An uninformed sender chooses a publicly observable experiment and sends a message to a receiver after privately learning the experimental outcome. To design the optimal experiment, the sender faces a tension between acquiring more information and alleviating the conflict of interest. In the...

A principal hires an agent to acquire costly information that will influence the decision of a third party. While the realized piece of information is observable and contractible, the experimental process is not. Assuming a general family of information cost functions (inclusive of Shannon's...

We study the optimal disclosure policy of a firm that wishes to maximize its expected stock price in the classic setting in which its stock is traded by risk-averse investors and noise traders. We find that the optimal disclosure policy is imprecise and leads to skewed posterior beliefs. This...

A monopolistic information provider sells an informative experiment to a large number of perfectly competitive firms. Within each firm, a principal contracts with an exclusive agent who is privately informed about his production cost. Principals decide whether to acquire the experiment, that is...

I study optimal information provision by a search goods seller. While the seller controls a consumer's pre-search information, which decides whether she will engage in costly search for the product, he cannot control her post-search information because the consumer would inevitably learn the...

In this paper I studied the optimal mechanism in selling information to decision makers with private prior knowledge about the payoff relevant state. When the underlying decision problem has a continuum of actions, the optimal mechanism will be a continuum menu of experiments with decreasing...

We study a dynamic buyer-seller problem in which the good is information and there are no property rights. The potential buyer is reluctant to pay for information whose value to him is uncertain, but the seller cannot credibly convey its value to the buyer without disclosing the information...