We study contracting when both principal and agent have to exert noncontractible effort for production to take place. An analyst is uncertain about what actions are available and evaluates a contract by the expected payoffs it guarantees to each party in spite of the surrounding uncertainty....

This paper studies an infinite horizon repeated moral hazard problem where a single principal employs several agents. We assume that the principal cannot observe the agents' effort choices; however, agents can observe each other and can be contractually required to make observation reports to...

This paper studies an infinite horizon repeated moral hazard problem where a single principal employs several agents. We assume that the principal cannot observe the agents' effort choices; however, agents can observe each other and can be contractually required to make observation reports to...

In this paper, I study the dynamic delegation problem in a principal-agent model wherein an agent privately observes a persistently evolving state, and the principal commits to actions based on the agent's reported state. There are no transfers. While the agent has state-independent preferences,...

We study the delegation problem between a principal and an agent, who not only has better information about the performance of the available actions but also superior awareness of the set of actions that are actually feasible. We provide conditions under which the agent finds it optimal to leave...

The founder of a start-up (principal) who has a project with uncertain returns must retain and incentivize an agent using promise of future payments and information gathering. The agent's effort incrementally advances production and such advance is a prerequisite for gathering new information....

We present a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for a class of optimal control problems with pure state constraints for which the objective function is linear in the state variable but the objective function is only required to be upper semi-continuous in the control variable. We apply...

We study a principal-agent model with moral hazard and adverse selection. Risk-neutral agents with limited liability have arbitrary private information about the distribution of outputs and the cost of effort. We show that under a multiplicative separability condition, the optimal mechanism...

Motivated by markets for ``expertise,'' we study a bandit model where a principal chooses between a safe and risky arm. A strategic agent controls the risky arm and privately knows whether its type is high or low. Irrespective of type, the agent wants to maximize duration of experimentation with...

Motivated by the growing discussion on the resemblance of multilevel marketing schemes to pyramid scams, we compare the two phenomena based on their underlying compensation structures. We show that a company can design a pyramid scam to exploit a network of agents with coarse beliefs and that...