Many financial arrangements reference market prices that are yet to be realized at the time of contracting and consequently susceptible to manipulation. Two of the most common such arrangements are: (i) market-on-close contracts, which reference the price prevailing at the end of an execution...

A common means of incorporating non-verifiable performance measures in compensation contracts is via bonus pools. We study a principal-multi-agent relational contracting model in which the optimal contract resembles a bonus pool. It specifies a minimum joint bonus floor the principal is required...

I consider a moral hazard problem with risk neutral parties, limited liability, and an informed principal. The contractible outcome is correlated to both the principal's private information and the agent's hidden action. In contrast to a model without a privately informed principal or without...

We introduce a continuous-time principal-agent model where the agent can privately influence both the drift and diffusion of the cash flows. The total diffusion is the product of the agent's volatility choice and a stochastic volatility process that is unobservable to the principal. This model...

Using an agency model, we show how delegation, by generating additional private information, improves dynamic incentives under limited commitment. It circumvents ratchet effects and facilitates the revelation of persistent private information through two effects: a play-hardball effect, which...

This paper characterizes the optimal contract when a principal has unverifiable subjective information that is correlated with an agent's private information. We find that the principal's subjective information alleviates the initial information asymmetry only if the correlation is sufficiently...

We study a discrete-time model of repeated moral hazard without commitment. In every period, a principal finances a project, choosing the scale of the project and a contingent payment plan for an agent, who has the opportunity to appropriate the returns of a successful project unbeknownst the...

I analyze how a firm should elicit advice from an expert on when to terminate a project with a stochastic lifespan. The firm cannot directly observe the project's lifespan, but imperfectly monitors its current state by observing incremental output. The expert directly observes the state of the...

This paper proposes "expected informativeness," an ex-ante counterpart of a likelihood ratio, in principal-agent models. The principal has an easy task and a difficult task to delegate. The difficult task requires high ability and high effort. It is the first-best outcome to assign tasks...