Designing Incentives for Heterogeneous Researchers

Nathan Yoder

Journal of Political Economy, 2022, vol. 130, issue 8, 2018 - 2054

Abstract: A principal (e.g., the US government) contracts with a researcher with unknown costs (e.g., a vaccine developer) to conduct a costly experiment. This contracting problem has a novel feature that captures the difference between the form of an experiment and the strength of its results: researchers face a problem of information design rather than optimal effort. Using a novel comparative static for Bayesian persuasion settings, I characterize the optimal contract and show how experimentation is distorted by the need to screen researchers. Moreover, I show that there is no loss from contracting on the experiment’s result rather than the experiment itself.

Date: 2022
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