We study optimal direct mechanisms for a credence goods expert who can be altruistic or spiteful. The expert has private information about her distributional preferences and possibly also about her customer's needs. We introduce a method that allows the customer to offer separate contracts to...

We study the effects of reputation and competition in a trust game. If trustees are anonymous, outcomes are poor: trustees are not trustworthy, and trustors do not trust. If trustees are identifiable and can, hence, build a reputation, efficiency quadruples but is still at only a third of the...

One perplexing observation is that although men and women have different comparative advantages, cooperation is often only seen during child-bearing and rearing periods. One interpretation is that the juvenile offspring serves as an indivisible public goods to facilitate cooperation between...

Conflicts of interest are the inherent price to pay to benefit from information synergies offered by multiple financial service providers. We focus on conflicts faced by a investment bank's "guru" sell-side analyst, which is torn between the pro-investor research department favoring fair...

A standard tournament contract specifies only tournament prizes. If agents’ performance is measured on a cardinal scale, the principal can complement the tournament contract by a gap which defines the minimum distance by which the best performing agent must beat the second best to receive the...

We study a combinatorial variant of the classical principal-agent model. In our setting a principal wishes to incentivize a team of strategic agents to exert costly effort on his behalf. Agentsʼ actions are hidden and the principal observes only the outcome of the team, which depends...

We study a discrete-time model of repeated moral hazard without commitment. In every period, a principal finances a project, choosing the scale of the project and a contingent payment plan for an agent, who has the opportunity to appropriate the returns of a successful project unbeknownst the...

Revenue sharing can be used to discourage low tax regions from competing for capital and firms with high tax regions. However, with heterogeneous regions, revenue sharing involves net transfers across regions and creates a “moral-hazard” problem - that is, regions may want to invest less in...

The paper studies theoretically how the optimal contract in the hidden-action moral hazard model is affected when an agent feels bad when not reaching a target effort set in the contract. While the presence of guilt brings the outcome closer to first-best, an effort target is not costless for...

The paper provides an overview of several selected topics dealing with application of agency theory to the credit contracts. The costly state verification and costly punishment models of optimal debt contracts are introduced and compared with respect to their performance in the situation...