The possibility of treason by a close associate has been a nightmare of most autocrats throughout history. More competent viziers are better able to discriminate among potential plotters, and this makes them more risky subordinates for the ruler. To avoid this, rulers, especially those which are...

When a principal’s monitoring information is private (non-verifiable), the agent should be concerned that the principal could misrepresent the information to reduce the agent’s wage or collect a monetary penalty. Restoring credibility may lead to an extreme waste of resources - the so-called...

The matter studied here is how, and with what implications, people may decide that they do not want to be let into secrets that concern them. They could get the information at no cost but they refuse to know. The reasoning is framed in terms of principals and agents, with the principals assumed...

The first scholars to propose, explicitly, that a theory of agency be created, and to actually begin its creation, were Stephen Ross and Barry Mitnick, independently and roughly concurrently. Ross is responsible for the origin of the economic theory of agency, and Mitnick for the institutional...

When reelection is uncertain, the election mechanism may provide insufficient incentives to politicians to implement the socially desirable policy. In this paper, we show that incentive contracts which the candidates offer themselves during the campaign can help to alleviate the problem even if...

To a very large extent, politics is agency. Indeed, agent-principal relationships pervade public and public-private behavior. This paper reviews the extensive but not yet integrated literature applying agency concepts to political settings. This includes agency in definitions of politics or...

In most electoral agency models, the principal observes an increasing signal of the agent's effort. But in enforcement contexts, the signal may be nonmonotonic. This is the case if the principal observes enforcement actions rather than underlying violation incidents (e.g., crime or infections)....

The paper addresses the mechanism design problem of eliciting truthful information from a committee of informed experts who collude in their information disclosure strategies. It is shown that under fairly general conditions full information disclosure is possible if and only if the induced...

This paper studies a contest in which players with unobservable types may form an alliance in a pre-stage of the game to join their forces and compete for a prize. We characterize the pure strategy equilibria of this game of incomplete information. We show that if the formation of an alliance is...

This paper analyses three issues in strategic donor-recipient interaction motivated by the complexity of the rationale underlying aid. The first is when we have several principals with conflicting objectives. Any one principal cannot offer high powered incentives to the agent to carry out their...