This paper addresses the class of generalized agency problems: situations in which adverse selection and moral hazard are jointly present. The complexity of the problem is increased by the interactions between the incentives associated with both types of private information. We present a...

The use of stock-based compensation for U.S. CEOs has increased significantly throughout the 1990s. Research interest, in particular on stock option compensation, has similarly increased, yet contradictory results create questions about the theoretical underpinnings. Therefore, we revisit the...

Cost-plus procurement contracts are widely used by the government. Although prior studies have recognized that payment ceilings are a common element in cost-plus procurement contracts, these studies have not examined the endogenous determination or the welfare effects of such ceilings. In this...

We model career concerns in a regime where a linear incentive contract includes a mix of a publicly observed performance measure and a second, correlated, private measure that is not observed by the labor market. Under this quot;mixquot; regime, we find that agent effort and total agency payoff...

This study reports the results of three experiments that examine how preferences for wealth and honesty affect managerial reporting. We find that subjects often sacrifice wealth to make honest or partially honest reports, and they generally do not lie more as the payoff to lying increases. We...

We study the role of peer groups in determining the structure and the total amount of executive compensation. Our analysis is based on a standard agency model in which the agent's reservation utility is related to the peer group used for performance evaluation. Our main result is that the...

In this paper, we study a setting where a firm (principal) is privately informed of the firm's potential and contracts with an agent to supply unobservable effort. We show it can be optimal for the firm to have loose monitoring in the sense that the monitoring system is less perfect than what is...

We consider a single-principal/multi-agent model to investigate the principal's preferences over delegated contracting. The analysis extends the single-agent/multi-task LEN model in Feltham and Xie (1994) to a multi-agent/multi-task context. We consider full-commitment contracts, i.e., the...

We assert that some forms of opportunistic behavior within the organization are relatively transparent and, therefore, public in nature. Further, while organizations can tightly control such public opportunism, it may not be optimal for them to do so in the presence of private opportunism. To...

The analysis in this paper extends the single-agent/multi-task LEN model in Feltham and Xie (1994) to a multi-agent/multi-task context. A key feature of the paper is that we consider centralized contracting with both full and limited commitment. The former refers to settings in which the...