Related papers: Buying Opinions
I study whether and which expert incentives can be provided at what cost when the states of the world become non-contractible, but there is some noisy observation about the states that can be contracted upon. A principal hires an agent to…
We consider a dynamic moral hazard problem between a principal and an agent, where the sole instrument the principal has to incentivize the agent is the disclosure of information. The principal aims at maximizing the (discounted) number of…
I study a principal-agent model in which a principal hires an agent to collect information about an unknown continuous state. The agent acquires a signal whose distribution is centered around the state, controlling the signal's precision at…
A principal delegates decisions to a biased agent. Payoffs depend on a state that the principal cannot observe. Initially, the agent does not observe the state, but he can acquire information about it at a cost. We characterize the…
A principal and an agent can launch a project under unanimous consent. Their individual payoffs from the project depend on an underlying state, and the agent privately knows his own preference. The principal can conduct a test to learn…
In principal-agent models, a principal offers a contract to an agent to perform a certain task. The agent exerts a level of effort that maximizes her utility. The principal is oblivious to the agent's chosen level of effort, and conditions…
We explore the deliberate infusion of ambiguity into the design of contracts. We show that when the agent is ambiguity-averse and hence chooses an action that maximizes their minimum utility, the principal can strictly gain from using an…
This paper studies a dynamic model of information acquisition, in which information might be secretly manipulated. A principal must choose between a safe action with known payoff and a risky action with uncertain payoff, favoring the safe…
We consider settings where an uninformed principal must hear arguments from two better-informed agents, corresponding to two possible courses of action that they argue for. The arguments are verifiable in the sense that the true state of…
A principal who values an object allocates it to one or more agents. Agents learn private information (signals) from an information designer about the allocation payoff to the principal. Monetary transfer is not available but the principal…
We consider the problem of a principal who needs to elicit the true worth of an object she owns from an agent who has a unique ability to compute this information. The correctness of the information cannot be verified by the principal, so…
We show that in delegation problems, a principal benefits from belief misalignment vis-\`a-vis an agent when the latter can flexibly acquire costly information. The agent optimally succumbs to confirmatory learning, leading him to favor the…
We study the fundamental problem of designing contracts in principal-agent problems under uncertainty. Previous works mostly addressed Bayesian settings in which principal's uncertainty is modeled as a probability distribution over agent's…
In the classical principal-agent problem, a principal must design a contract to incentivize an agent to perform an action on behalf of the principal. We study the classical principal-agent problem in a setting where the agent can be of one…
We consider sequential search by an agent who cannot observe the quality of goods but can acquire information by buying signals from a profit-maximizing principal with limited commitment power. The principal can charge higher prices for…
We study a two-period moral hazard problem; there are two agents, with action sets that are unknown to the principal. The principal contracts with each agent sequentially, and seeks to maximize the worst-case discounted sum of payoffs,…
We examine the strategic interaction between an expert (principal) maximizing engagement and an agent seeking swift information. Our analysis reveals: When priors align, relative patience determines optimal disclosure -- impatient agents…
This paper studies the provision of incentives for information acquisition. Information is costly for an agent to acquire and unobservable to a principal. We show that any Pareto optimal contract has a decomposition into a fraction of…
We consider the problem of Adverse Selection and optimal derivative design within a Principal-Agent framework. The principal's income is exposed to non-hedgeable risk factors arising, for instance, from weather or climate phenomena. She…
We study the classic principal-agent model when the signal observed by the principal is chosen by the agent. We fully characterize the optimal information structure from an agent's perspective in a general moral hazard setting with limited…