A criticism of mechanism design theory is that the optimal mechanism designed for one environment can produce drastically different actions, outcomes, and payoffs in a second, even slightly different, environment. In this sense, the theoretically optimal mechanisms usually studied are not...

This paper studies monitoring and accrual measurement in a principal-agent setting. The advantage of the principal-agent setting is that it allows accrual measurement to be explicitly connected to monitoring and to encompass questions of managerial behaviour and communication incentives. It also...