Related papers: Expert Incentives under Partially Contractible Sta…
This work considers a repeated principal-agent bandit game, where the principal can only interact with her environment through the agent. The principal and the agent have misaligned objectives and the choice of action is only left to the…
I study the optimal design of ratings to motivate agent investment in quality when transfers are unavailable. The principal designs a rating scheme that maps the agent's quality to a (possibly stochastic) score. The agent has private…
Agents receive private signals about an unknown state. The resulting joint belief distributions are complex and lack a simple characterization. Our key insight is that, when conditioned on the state, the structure of belief distributions…
How to incentivize self-interested agents to explore when they prefer to exploit? Consider a population of self-interested agents that make decisions under uncertainty. They "explore" to acquire new information and "exploit" this…
Motivating careerists is challenging for political organizations. Without explicit contracts, careerists often pander to public opinions or their superiors' preferences. Worse, when tasked with implementing these distorted decisions, they…
We study expert advice under reputational incentives, with sell-side equity research as the lead application. A long-lived analyst receives a continuous private signal about a binary payoff and recommends a risky (Buy) or safe action.…
We consider an infinite collection of agents who make decisions, sequentially, about an unknown underlying binary state of the world. Each agent, prior to making a decision, receives an independent private signal whose distribution depends…
When information acquisition is costly but flexible, a principal may rationally acquire information that favors one group over another. The former group faces incentives to invest in becoming productive, while the latter is discouraged from…
Linear contracts are ubiquitous in practice, yet optimal contract theory often prescribes complex, nonlinear structures. We provide a distributional robustness justification for linear contracts. We study a principal-agent problem where the…
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…
In dynamic settings each economic agent's choices can be revealing of her private information. This elicitation via the rationalization of observable behavior depends each agent's perception of which payoff-relevant contingencies other…
We study misspecified Bayesian learning in principal-agent relationships, where an agent is assessed by an evaluator and rewarded by the market. The agent's outcome depends on their innate ability, costly effort -- whose effectiveness is…
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 examine receiver-optimal mechanisms for aggregating information divided across many biased senders. Each sender privately observes an unconditionally independent signal about an unknown state, so no sender can verify another's report. A…
Correlated equilibria enable a coordinator to influence the self-interested agents by recommending actions that no player has an incentive to deviate from. However, the effectiveness of this mechanism relies on accurate knowledge of the…
Firms strategically disclose product information in order to attract consumers, but recipients often find it costly to process all of it, especially when products have complex features. We study a model of competitive information disclosure…
We study how a principal should optimally choose between implementing a new policy and maintaining the status quo when information relevant for the decision is privately held by agents. Agents are strategic in revealing their information;…
A researcher observes a finite sequence of choices made by multiple agents in a binary-state environment. Agents maximize expected utilities that depend on their chosen alternative and the unknown underlying state. Agents learn about the…
Contemporary scientific research is a distributed, collaborative endeavor, carried out by teams of researchers, regulatory institutions, funding agencies, commercial partners, and scientific bodies, all interacting with each other and…
We investigate a pricing rule that is applicable for streams of income or contingent claim liabilities and study how this rule changes under additional insider-type information that an investor might obtain. Considering a model where the…