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I study the optimal incentive provision in a principal-agent relationship with costly information acquisition by the agent. I emphasize that adverse selection or moral hazard is the principal's endogenous choice by inducing or deterring information acquisition. The principal designs the contract not only to address an existing incentive problem but also to implement its presence. Implementation of adverse selection relies on a steeper information rent to the agent than the standard menu, such that the agent is motivated to distinguish the efficient state of nature from the inefficient. Moral hazard is implemented by replacing the benchmark debt contract with a debt-with-equity-share contract, such that the agent does not attempt to acquire information to either avoid debt or to extract rent.

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I study the optimal team incentive when the agents can coordinate private actions through repeated interaction with imperfect public monitoring. The agents are able to imperfectly infer each other's private actions via the stochastically correlated measurements. Correlation of measurement noise, besides its risk sharing role in the conventional multiple-agent moral hazard problem, is crucial to the accuracy of each agent's inference. The principal's choice of performance pay to provide incentive via inducing competition or coordination among the agents thus exhibits the trade-off between risk sharing and mutual inference between the agents. I characterize the optimal form of performance pay with respect to the correlation of measurement noise. Whether the conventional theoretical prediction holds depends on how the agents form the mutual inference, based on an exogenous standard or formed endogenously.

I study how private information on the evolution of preference interacts with the dynamic screening contracts in a principal-agent framework with short-term commitment. Privacy on the evolution of preference preserves the agent’s future information advantage, even following truthful revelation of preference. This relaxes the ratchet effects if the consumer’s initial preference is skewedly distributed and the evolution of preference is distributed sufficiently evenly, while it strengthens the ratchet effects if otherwise. Through its relaxation or strengthening of the ratchet effects, privacy on (im)persistency implies an improvement or distortion in the equilibrium revelation of preference. I also characterize the respective implications on the optimal contracts. Such privacy is not welcomed by all types of the agent, for it redistributes the information rent among different types. Privacy on the evolution of preference sustains in equilibrium, as it is not optimal for the principal to perfectly screen the (im)persistency per se.