Publications [#362198] of Curtis R. Taylor

Journal Articles

1. Häfner, S; Taylor, CR, On young Turks and yes men: optimal contracting for advice, RAND Journal of Economics, vol. 53 no. 1 (March, 2022), pp. 63-94 [doi]
   (last updated on 2026/01/10)

   Abstract:
   We study contracting for advice by an agent about how much a principal should invest in a project. Providing the agent with incentives to perform research endogenously generates incentives for her to misreport the results. For high-cost (low-cost) projects, she wishes to overstate (understate) the magnitude—though not the direction—of her research findings. For high-cost projects, the principal mitigates the concomitant agency rents by committing to ignore extreme (Young-Turk) recommendations, whereas for low-cost projects, he ignores mild (Yes-Man) ones. These results are shown to be robust to several natural extensions of the model.