We study a dynamic contracting problem in which the principal can allocate his limited capacity between seeking evidence that confirms or that contradicts the agent's effort, as the basis for reward or punishment. Such flexibility calls for jointly designed monitoring and compensation schemes...

We propose a theory of security design in financing entrepreneurial production, positing that the investor can acquire costly information on the entrepreneur's project before making the financing decision. When the entrepreneur has enough bargaining power in security design, the optimal security...

Recent advances in IT and data science give firms more flexibility to process, store and communicate the growing volume and variety of performance data at a reduced and yet significant cost. In this paper, we study the impact of this cost and flexibility on employee monitoring and the internal...

We study the optimality of debt through the interaction between security design and information acquisition. An impatient seller designs a security backed by her asset in place and a buyer decides whether to buy the security in order to provide liquidity. Facing different securities, the buyer...

We study a coordination game where players simultaneously acquire information prior to the play of the game. We allow general information acquisition technologies, modeled by a cost functional mapping from information structures. Costly local distinguishability is a property requiring that the...

Players choose a stochastic choice rule, assigning a probability of “investing” as a function of a state. Players receive a return to investment that is increasing in the proportion of others who invest and the state. In addition, they incur a small cost associated with adapting the...

We study optimal disclosure rules that alleviate inefficiencies caused by managerial private benefits. An entrepreneur raises capital from investors by designing a security and an associated covenant. The covenant allocates the control right of the project to the entrepreneur or investors in the...

We study liquidity provision by dealers in a dynamic model of asset markets. When economic fundamentals are high (low), dealers provide more (less) liquidity by holding more (less) inventory, the market is liquid (illiquid), and interdealer trading is active (inactive). When fundamentals are...