A principal hires an agent to work on a project of unknown quality. Success is contractible, but before it occurs, the agent may privately obtain a favorable finding. For example, a scientist developing a drug may observe a promising microscope reading. An informed agent may conceal the finding; an uninformed agent may fake one. The agent's private information could guide both the project's duration and his pay. Yet I show that an optimal contract pays only success bonuses tied to time, not reported findings, consistent with time-based payment schedules often used in research funding. Dynamically arriving private information drives this simplicity: the agent can conceal good news to retain higher bonuses, so deterring concealment limits pay differences across report histories. Bonuses are high and rising in a research stage that induces learning, then fall to a low, constant level in a development stage where only an informed agent continues working. Rising bonuses reflect a novel force: rents from private learning motivate effort but shrink as fewer research periods remain.

A platform charges a producer for disclosing quality evidence to consumers before trade. It aims to maximize its revenue guarantee across potentially multiple equilibria which arise from the interdependence of producer purchase decisions and consumer beliefs. The platform's optimal pricing strategy entrenches itself as a market gatekeeper: it induces a unique equilibrium in which non-disclosed products' perceived values are lower than the production cost. To achieve this goal, this pricing strategy iteratively destabilizes under-disclosure equilibria by luring producers to disclose slightly more. Higher-quality producers receive higher rents as their disclosure is prioritized. Despite losing rents, the platform optimally induces socially efficient information transmission for any given evidence structure, and it never benefits from garbling evidence. Compared to the non-robust benchmark, our framework generates more intuitive comparative statics: the platform's ability to extract surplus increases with its value as an information intermediary.

Extended Abstract in Proceedings of EC’24, under the title Robust Advertisement Pricing

We study optimal contracting when workers face career concerns. Labor markets infer ability from performance, but effort affects how informative performance is. This feedback can generate strategic uncertainty: bonuses inducing effort under optimistic beliefs about effort may fail under pessimistic beliefs. We characterize this force through a criterion tied to skill-effort complementarity and solve for the least-cost policy implementing effort in every equilibrium. Under strategic uncertainty, the employer uses dispersed bonuses. High bonuses rule out pessimistic beliefs, raising the reputational stakes and letting lower bonuses motivate effort. Pay dispersion among observationally identical workers grows with career concerns and skill-wage assortativeness.

I study a general framework of contracting with externalities involving a non-contractible outsider. Strategic symmetry between the insider agent and the outsider is the source of multiple equilibria, even when their actions are strategic substitutes. To tackle strategic uncertainty, the principal guarantees a unique equilibrium outcome. A novel duality approach reformulates her problem as the choice of a series of agent expectations about outsider behavior, one for each agent action. The key constraint comes from eliminating undesired equilibria: she cannot convince the agent to expect higher incentives than those generated by the outsider's best responses to the actions she has already conquered. To reduce strategic rents, the principal optimally induces attenuated agent incentives. In supermodular or submodular environments, her coordination power and commitment power are substitutes in determining the contracting outcome, and perfect substitutes under further conditions. On contractual privacy, the principal can strictly prefer private contracting over public contracting, in sharp contrast to the benchmark that ignores robustness. Applications include regulating international competition, platform design, and labor union contracting.

This paper studies a war of attrition over public good provision among multiple ex-ante asymmetric privately informed players. In equilibrium, asymmetry leads to a stratified behavior pattern in which at most one player provides the public good at time zero with a positive probability, while the other players can become active one after another, each at a player-specific activation time, before which even his highest type does not provide the good. The equilibrium is essentially unique: the types who never provide make the players' costs of providing a saddle point of the equilibrium dynamics. Comparing two players in the same war, I show that the one with lower cost, more impatience, or a value distribution tilted toward high values in the sense of a higher revelation rate provides earlier at every value, other things equal. In large societies, the cost of delay is determined by the highest value across players.

A principal who offers a contract may renege when her default option is sufficiently attractive. The size of this temptation, which inversely measures her commitment power, is often the principal's private information. This paper asks how contracting outcomes change under this information asymmetry. Disciplining off-path beliefs with the Intuitive Criterion, I find that every type of principal behaves and earns payoffs as if she were commonly known to have the least commitment power. Hidden commitment power is therefore powerless, although commitment power can be valuable under symmetric information. The result delivers an unambiguous policy lesson on how to mitigate this information asymmetry prior to contracting: only measures that improve the worst case have value. In an application to credit rating, when the cost of a rating system grows with its number of grades, a rating system that sorts issuers into ordered bands is optimal, and each issuer contracts on the terms warranted by the floor of her band.