Descending mechanisms for procurement (or, ascending mechanisms for selling) have been well‐recognized for their simplicity from the viewpoint of bidders — they require less bidder sophistication as compared to sealed‐bid mechanisms. In this study, we consider procurement under each of two...

We consider a principal who periodically offers a fixed, binary, and costly non-monetary reward to agents endowed with private information, to incentivize the agents to invest effort over the long run. An agent's output, as a function of his effort, is a priori uncertain and is worth a fixed...