Principal-agent models in which the agent has access to private information before a contract is signed are a cornerstone of contract theory. We have conducted an experiment with 720 participants to explore whether the theoretical insights are reflected by the behavior of subjects in the...

A central insight of agency theory is that when a principal offers a contract to a privately informed agent, the principal trades off ex post efficiency in the bad state of nature against a larger profit in the good state of nature. We report about an experiment with 508 participants designed to...

Evidence suggests that unemployed individuals can sometimes affect their job prospects by undertaking a costly action like deciding to move or retrain. Realistically, such an opportunity only arises for some individuals and the identity of those may be unobservable ex-ante. The problem of...

We consider a competitive search model where firms with vacancies choose between posting a wage ex-ante and bargaining it with workers ex-post. Workers apply for vacancies after observing firms' wage setting decisions, and differ in some observable but not verifiable qualifications that affect...

Information asymmetries are important in theory but difficult to identify in practice. We estimate the presence and importance of adverse selection and moral hazard in a consumer credit market using a new field experiment methodology. We randomized 58,000 direct mail offers issued by a major...

We analyze a game of two-sided private information characterized by extreme adverse selection, and study a special case in the laboratory. Each player has a privately known "strength" and can decide to fight or compromise. If either chooses to fight, there is a conflict; the stronger player...

What are the welfare effects of a policy that facilitates for insurance customers to privately and covertly learn about their accident risks? We endogenize the information structure in Stiglitz's classic monopoly insurance model. We first show that his results are robust: For a small information...

Recent empirical work finds that surprisingly little variation in the demand for insurance is explained by heterogeneity in risks. I distinguish between heterogeneity in risk preferences and risk perceptions underlying the unexplained variation. Heterogeneous risk perceptions induce a systematic...

In a vertical market in which downstream firms have private information about their productivity and compete for consumers, an upstream firm posts public bilateral contracts. When downstream firms are risk-neutral without wealth constraints, the upstream firm offers the input to all retailers....