This article considers a principal-agent problem in which the principal has access to a costly monitoring technology that can be used to acquire additional information about the agent's actions subsequent to observing the agent's output. Although randomized monitoring policies are feasible, we...

In an agency setting where the agent must be compensated both to exert effort to produce a new project and to announce honestly when the new project has been produced, we show that Holmstrom's (1979) well-known "informativeness criterion" does not, by itself, determine whether a variable is...