Outsourcing public services to private providers is heralded for increasing government efficiency. Yet, outsourcing also offers opportunities to circumvent employment regulations in the public sector. The praised flexibility that private contractors have to hire employees can also be used to...

We consider an in nitely repeated reappointment game in a principal- agent relationship. Typical examples are voter-politician or government- public servant relationships. The agent chooses costly effort and enjoys being in office until he is deselected. The principal observes a noisy signal of...

We consider an infinitely repeated reappointment game in a principal-agent relationship. Typical examples are voter-politician or government-public servant relationships. The agent chooses costly effort and enjoys being in office until he is deselected. The principal observes a noisy signal of...

The government wants a certain good or service to be provided. Should the required assets be publicly or privately owned or should a partnership be formed‘ Building on the incomplete contracting approach, we argue that the initially specified quantity of an ex ante describable basic good can...

In a continuous-time setting where a risk-averse agent controls the drift of an output process driven by a Brownian motion, optimal contracts are linear in the terminal output; this result is well-known in a setting with moral hazard and - under stronger assumptions - adverse selection. Using...

In this chapter we study dynamic incentive models in which risk sharing is endogenously limited by the presence of informational or enforcement frictions. We comprehensively overview one of the most important tools for the analysis such problems—the theory of recursive contracts. Recursive...

This paper considers a long-term relationship between two agents who undertake costly actions or investments which produce a joint benefit. Agents have an opportunity to expropriate some of the joint benefit for their own use. The question asked is how to structure the investments and division...

We study optimal effort and compensation in a continuous-time model with three-sided moral hazard and cost synergies. One agent exerts initial effort to start the project; the other two agents exert ongoing effort to manage it. The project generates cash flow at a fixed rate over its lifespan;...

The marginal cost of effort often increases as effort is exerted. In a dynamic moral hazard setting, dynamically increasing costs create information asymmetry. This paper characterizes the optimal contract and helps explain the popular yet thus far puzzling use of non-linear incentives, for...

We study an optimal long-term labor contract that provides disability insurance benefits under two frictions: the agent cannot commit to a long-term contract and the disability shock is private information. We predict that a job with a high risk of disability should provide a higher level of...