We address empirically the issues of the optimality of simple linear compensation contracts and the importance of asymmetries between firms and workers. For that purpose, we consider contracts between the French National Institute of Statistics and Economics (Insee) and the interviewers it hired...

We explore the conditions under which the "first-order approach" (FO-approach) can be used to characterize profit maximizing contracts in dynamic principal-agent models. The FO-approach works when the resulting FO-optimal contract satisfies a particularly strong form of monotonicity in types, a...

A buyer makes an offer to a privately informed seller for a good of uncertain quality. Quality determines both the seller's valuation and the buyer's valuation, and the buyer evaluates each contract according to its worst-case performance over a set of probability distributions. This paper...

I study a repeated principal-agent game with long‐term output contracts that can be renegotiated at will. Actions are observable but not contractible, so they can only be incentivized through implicit agreements formed in equilibrium. I show that contract renegotiation is a powerful tool for...

A loss averse buyer and seller face an uncertain environment. Should they write a long-term contract or wait until the state of the world has realized? I show that simple long-term contracts perform better than insinuated in Herweg and Schmidt (2015), even though loss aversion makes...

A loss-averse buyer and seller face an uncertain environment. Should they write a long-term contract or wait until the state of the world is realized? I show that simple long-term contracts perform better than insinuated in Herweg and Schmidt (2015), even though loss aversion makes renegotiation...

A decision maker, named Alice, wants to know if an expert has significant information about payoff-relevant probabilities of future events. The expert, named Bob, either knows this probability almost perfectly or knows nothing about it. Hence, both Alice and the uninformed expert face...