The export of grain from Western Australia depends upon a grain supply network that takes grain from farm to port through Cooperative Bulk Handling receival and storage sites. The ability of the network to deliver pest free grain to the port and onto ship depends upon the quality of grain...

Using a gift exchange experiment, we show that the ability of reciprocity to overcome incentive problems inherent in principal-agent settings is greatly reduced when the agent’s effort is distorted by random shocks and transmitted imperfectly to the principal. Specifically, we find that gift...

We solve the principal-agent problem of a monopolist insurer selling to an agent whose riskiness (loss chance) is private information, a problem introduced in Stiglitz's (1977) seminal paper. For an \emph{arbitrary} type distribution, we prove several properties of optimal menus, such as...

One of the main predictions of principal-agent theory, the “informativeness principle”, is often violated in practice. We propose an explanation that emphasizes the role played by the change in the form of the optimal contract that follows an improvement in informativeness. We show that the...

We use a comparative approach to study the incentives provided by different types of compensation contracts, and their valuation by risk averse managers, in a fairly general setting. We show that concave contracts tend to provide more incentives to risk averse managers, while convex contracts...