In a principal-agent environment with moral hazard and symmetric information, having or acquiring a more informative technology lowers the cost to implement a given action. Contracting may occur after or before the principal learns her technology. We show that when the principal has or will acquire private information about her technology, (i) with ex post contracting, the value of information for the principal may be negative; and (ii) although the agent prefers that the principal has private information with ex post contracting, ex ante contracting is superior to ex post contracting by the Potential Pareto Criterion.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
Publisher Info
Paper provided by Deakin University, Faculty of Business and Law, School of Accounting, Economics and Finance in its series Economics Series with number
2006_22.
Find related papers by JEL classification: D82 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Asymmetric and Private Information D83 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Search, Learning, and Information
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Did you know? You can include your works in the database easily by uploading them on the Munich Personal RePEc Archive (MPRA) if you do not have access to an institutional RePEc archive.