Although stock options are commonly observed in chief executive o±cer (CEO) compensation contracts, there is theoretical controversy about whether stock options are part of the optimal contract. Using a sample of Fortune 500 companies, we solve an agency model calibrated to the company-specific...

We examine the design of incentive-compatible screening mechanisms for dynamic environments in which the agents' types follow a (possibly non-Markov) stochastic process, decisions may be made over time and may affect the type process, and payoffs need not be time-separable. We derive a formula...

These notes examine the problem of how to extend envelope theorems to infinite-horizon dynamic mechanism design settings, with an application to the design of bandit auctions.

We characterize the firm's optimal contract for a manager who faces costly effort decisions and whose ability to generate profits for the firm changes stochastically over time. The optimal contract is obtained as the solution to a dynamic mechanism design problem with hidden actions and...

We study second-degree price discrimination in markets where the product traded by the monopolist is access to other agents. We derive necessary and sufficient conditions for the welfare and the profit-maximizing mechanisms to employ a single network or a menu of non-exclusive networks. We...

Contracts adopted with later renegotiation in mind may take simple forms. In a principal-agent model, if renegotiation may occur after the agent chooses efforet, the principal protects against unfavorable renegotiation by "selling the project" to the agent via a sales contract. If only singleton...

We develop a theory of price discrimination in many-to-many matching markets in which agents' preferences are vertically and horizontally differentiated. The optimal plans induce negative assortative matching at the margin: agents with a low value for interacting with other agents are included...

When designing incentives for a manager, the trade-off between insurance and a "good" allocation of effort across various tasks is often identified with a trade-off between the responsiveness (sensitivity, precision, signal-noise ratio) of the performance measure and its similarity (congruity,...

We use a human-subjects experiment to test the effects of a simple mechanism designed to increase cooperation and efficiency in the trust game. In the equilibrium of the standard trust game, the investor does not invest, foreseeing that the allocator would have kept all of the returns from...