This paper analyzes relational contracts under moral hazard. We first show that if the available information (signal) about effort satisfies a generalized monotone likelihood ratio property, then irrespective of whether the first-order approach (FOA) is valid or not, the optimal bonus scheme...

We consider how a principal can optimally outsource information acquisition to an agent in a dynamic environment when the principal can observe neither the agent's effort of collecting information nor signal realizations. Neither initial transaction nor interim payments are allowed to prevent...

This paper seeks to characterize incentive compensation in a static principal-agent moral hazard setting in which both the principal and the agent are prudent (or downside risk averse). We show that optimal incentive pay should then be `approximately concave' in performance, the approximation...

This paper studies relational incentive contracts with persistent states in the presence of both moral hazard and information asymmetry. The optimal contracts are dynamic in which the agents are rewarded following a high output by moving to a higher continuation payoff in the next period. The...

It is s important for firms to choose appropriate performance measurements when they evaluate their employees' performance. In this paper, we examine the relationship between uncertainty and incentives in which the risk-averse agent has the specific knowledge. We show that uncertainty does not...

Drawing on the proposer-responder game examined by Andreoni, Harbaugh, and Vesterlund (2003), I experimentally test four variations of a principal-agent relationship with fixed pay and real effort. Depending on the treatment, the principal can voluntarily, but at her own expense, (1) only reward...

We study a relational contracting model with two agents where each agent faces multiple tasks: effort toward the agent's own project and helping effort toward another agent's project. We first propose the two-step approach, which is useful for characterizing the equilibrium of relational...

We study a credence goods problem - that is, a moral hazard problem with non-contractible outcome - where altruistic experts (the agents) care both about their income and the utility of consumers (the principals). Experts' preferences over income and their consumers' utility are convex, such...

I examine whether stochastic contracts benefit the principal in the setting of moral hazard and loss aversion. Incorporating that the agent is expectation-based loss averse and allowing the principal to add noise to performance signals, I find that stochastic contracts reduce the principal's...

We consider a two-stage principal-agent model with limited liability in which a CEO is employed as agent to gather information about suitable merger targets and to manage the merged corporation in case of an acquisition. Our results show that the CEO systematically recommends targets with low...