Dynamic Contracting Under Soft Information

A principal delegates the running of a project to an agent subject to moral hazard over an infinite horizon, and cannot observe any of the outcomes. The agent sends reports at each instant t; naturally reports may be manipulated. Eliciting truthful revelation is necessary to the provision of effort, and is achievable by using audits and penalties. It requires that the continuation value of the agent be kept large enough, and the agent be terminated below a threshold; she receives an endogenous information rent. That rent is completely determined by the parameters of the moral hazard problem. The optimal audit trades off the instantaneous audit cost versus the drift of the cash flow process. The contract is implemented in standard financial securities. The effect of the governance problem on the cost of capital is subtle: a positive continuation utility at termination implies some recovery by financiers and so decreases the credit spread. But a deterioration in governance increases that spread sharply.