A principal provides budgets to agents (e.g., divisions of a firm or the principal's children) whose expenditures provide her benefits, either materially or because of altruism. Only agents know their potential to generate benefits. We prove that if the more "productive" agents are also more...

The random incentive system (RIS) is a standard incentive scheme used to elicit preferences in economic experiments. However, it has been speculated that RIS may not be incentive compatible when participants are concerned about ambiguity, i.e., that the choices observed under RIS do not reflect...

We study the optimal dynamics of incentives for a manager whose ability to generate cash .ows changes stochastically with time and is his private information. We show that, in general, the power of incentives (or "pay for performance") may either increase or decrease with tenure. However, risk...