The government wants two tasks to be performed. In each task, unobservable effort can be exerted by a wealth-constrained private contractor. If the government faces no binding budget constraints, it is optimal to bundle the tasks. The contractor in charge of both tasks then gets a bonus payment...

Deadlines and penalties are widely used to incentivize effort. We model how these incentive contracts affect the work rate and time taken in a procurement setting, characterizing the efficient contract design. Using new micro-level data on Minnesota highway construction contracts that includes...

We analyze a dynamic principal-agent problem in which the agent's effort in each period has strong persistent effects. We show that a simple contract, where the reward depends only on the final outcome, is explained as the optimal contract derived in the principal's optimization problem. The...

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...

We show that contracting in agency with voluntary participation may involve incentives for the agent's abstention. Their provision alters the optimality criteria in the principal's decision-making, further distorts the mechanism, and may lead to breakdown of contracting in circumstances where...

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...

Moral hazard models with hidden saving decisions are useful to study such diverse problems as unemployment insurance, income taxation, executive compensation, or human capital policies. How can we solve such models? In general, this is very difficult. Under the conditions derived in this paper,...

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...