We compare upfront and staged financing to see when and how one financing policy prevails over the other. In our model, there are two moral hazard problems that interact with each other. First, the entrepreneur may pursue his own private benefit out of the raised fund in the initial period....

This paper considers an agency contracting with multiple tasks. The agent is privately informed on some tasks, but he must gather information on the other. We show that depending on the cost to gather information, task assignment is employed as an instrument to induce information gathering, or...

Rewards to prevent supervisors from accepting bribes create incentives for extortion. This raises the question whether a supervisor who can engage in bribery and extortion can still be useful in providing incentives. By highlighting the role of team work in forging information, we present a...

Both bribery and extortion weaken the power of incentives, but there is a trade-off in fighting the two because rewards to prevent supervisors from accepting bribes create incentives for extortion. Which is the worse evil? A fear of inducing extortion may make it optimal to tolerate bribery, but...

This paper provides a rationale for why an organization often generates a bias in favor of a new project even after learning that its profitability will be certainly below more conventional ones. We analyze a principal-agent model with two alternative projects, one of which is to be chosen by...