This paper studies a principal-agent relationship in which either the principal or a supervisor can monitor the agent's hidden action by the use of identical monitoring technologies. We assume that signals are private information and commitment to monitoring is not possible. We show that delegation of monitoring is profitable. With delegation the principal can better regulate incentives (incentive-effect) and commit to a broader range of wage structures (commitment-effect). We introduce collusion to find an endogenous bound on rewards and show that collusion limits the commitment-effect, but due to the incentive-effect delegation remains profitable.

This paper extends the revelation principle to environments in which the mechanism designer cannot fully commit to the outcome induced by the mechanism. We show that he may optimally use a direct mechanism under which truthful revelation is an optimal strategy for the agent. In contrast with the conventional revelation principle, however, the agent may not use this strategy with probability one. Our results apply to contracting problems between a principal and a single agent. By reducing such problems to well-defined programming problems they provide a basic tool for studying imperfect commitment.

We develop a model to show that transparent accounting can worsen the asset substitution effect of debt. This negative effect can outweigh the usual positive effect of transparency. We demonstrate this point by comparing pure historical cost accounting to the conservatively skewed accounting regime of lower-of-cost-or-market (LCM). In a market with asymmetric information, the two regimes lead to different degrees of transparency. The more transparent LCM regime produces more efficient results for firms with lower debt levels, while the opaque rule of pure historical cost accounting is preferable for higher debt levels. We explore the implications of this result for the firm's optimal capital structure.

In markets with quality unobservable to buyers, third-party certification is often the only instrument to increase transparency. While both sellers and buyers have a demand for certification, its role differs fundamentally: sellers use it for signalling, buyers use it for inspection. Seller-induced certification leads to more transparency, because it is informative—even if unused. By contrast, buyer-induced certification incentivizes certifiers to limit transparency, as this raises demand for inspection. Whenever transparency is socially beneficial, seller certification is preferable. It also yields certifiers larger profits, so that regulating the mode of certification is redundant.

We develop a theory of collective brand reputation for markets in which product quality is jointly determined by local and global players. In a repeated game of imperfect public monitoring, we model collective branding as an aggregation of quality signals generated in different markets. Such aggregation yields a beneficial informativeness effect for incentivizing the global player. It however also induces harmful free-riding by local, market-specific players. The resulting trade-off yields a theory of optimal brand size and revenue sharing that applies to platform markets, franchising, licensing, umbrella branding, and firms with team production.