When agents with private information compete for resources from a principal and are biased towards their own favored projects (e.g., a CEO decides which division manager's project to fund) an agency problem arises. However, possible future interaction can mitigate this problem even without...

A principal must choose an agent to perform a task and faces a tradeoff in deciding when to hold a selection contest. Agents' types evolve and thus a later contest is more accurate. However, an agent's effort in the contest diminishes her task performance and the less time until the task, the...

We analyze the design of an optimal contract in a two-person partnership in which all the firm's proceeds are re-distributed back to the workers according to a noisy binary signal of relative performance. A worker devotes two types of costly effort: own effort into his assigned task and helping...