The paper studies procurement contracts with pre-project investigations in the presence of adverse selection and moral hazard. To model the procurer's roblem, we extend a standard sequential screening model to endogenous information acquisition with moral hazard. The optimal contract displays...

We consider a general mechanism design setting where each agent can acquire (covert) information before participating in the mechanism. The central question is whether a mechanism exists which provides the efficient incentives for information acquisition ex-ante and implements the efficient...

This paper analyzes the optimal provision of incentives in a sequential testing context. In every period the agent can acquire costly information that is relevant to the principal's decision. Neither the agent's effort nor the realizations of his signals are observable. First, we assume that the...

We consider a general mechanism design setting where each agent can acquire covert information before participating in the mechanism. The central question is whether a mechanism exists which provides the efficient incentives for information acquisition ex-ante and implements the efficient...

Models of choice where agents see others as less sophisticated than themselves have significantly different, sometimes more accurate, predictions in games than does Nash equilibrium. When it comes to mechanism design, however, they turn out to have surprisingly similar implications. This paper...

A mediator, with no prior information and no control over the market protocol, attempts to redesign the information structure in the market by running an information intermediation mechanism with transfers that first elicits information from an agent, and then discloses information to another...

I consider a situation, where the agent can acquire payoff-relevant information either before or after the contract is signed. To raise efficiency, the principal might solicit information; to retain all surplus, however, she must prevent precontractual information gathering. The following class...

We study a principal--agent model. The parties are symmetrically informed at first; the principal then designs the process by which the agent learns his type and, concurrently, the screening mechanism. Because the agent can opt out of the mechanism ex post, it must leave him with nonnegative...

We consider a general information design problem in which the task of running a procedure generating information for a continuation game is performed by an agent. A moral hazard roblem therefore emerges in which the principal faces a trade-off between generating information with an eye to the...

Truthtelling is often viewed as focal in direct mechanisms. We introduce two new notions of robust implementation based on the premise that society may be composed of "primitive'' agents who, whenever confronted with a strategy profile, anchor to truthtelling and make a limited number of...