Costly Verification of Cost Performance and the Competition for Incentive Contracts
分析当委托人无法事先承诺监控政策且事后验证成本高昂时，如何设计最优线性激励合同来吸引代理人竞争项目。成本分担减少信息租金但鼓励虚增成本，最优参数随竞标人数和成本方差变化。
This article analyzes the optimal linear incentive contract to offer to would-be agents competing for a principal's project when the principal finds it costly to observe an agent's cost performance ex post and cannot commit to monitoring policy ex ante. Cost sharing reduces the winning bidder's informational rents but creates an incentive for the agent to pad costs ex post to slacken his effort. The optimal cost-sharing parameter generally differs from that when monitoring is costless, and it is higher the fewer the number of bidders and the larger the variance of their idiosyncratic cost.