When self-interested agents compete for scarce resources, they often exaggerate the promise of their activities. As such, principals must consider both the quality of each opportunity and each agent's credibility. We show that principals are better off with less transparency because they gain...

Venture projects are fraught with exogenous market risk and endogenous agency risk. We apply a real options perspective to analyze the investment decision of the venture capitalist (VC) in this set-up. The solutions presented are conflictive: the VC reduces his exposure to exogenous risk by...

Equality of opportunity is usually defined as a situation where the effect of circumstances on outcome is nullified (compensation principle) and effort is rewarded (reward principle). We propose a new version of the reward principle based on the idea that effort deserves reward for it is costly....