Article

Experimentation and project selection: Screening and learning

Renato Gomes, Daniel Gottlieb, and Lucas Maestri

Abstract

Firms must strike a delicate balance between the exploitation of well-known business models and the exploration of risky, untested approaches. In this paper, we study financial contracting between an investor and a firm with private information about its returns from exploration and exploitation. The investor-optimal mechanism offers contracts with different tolerance for failures to screen returns from exploitation, and with different exposure to the project's revenues to screen returns from exploration. We derive necessary and sufficient conditions for private information about returns from exploration to have zero value to the firm. When these conditions fail, private information about exploration may even decrease the firm's payoff.

Keywords

Adverse selection; Experimentation; Bandit problem; Multi-dimensional screening; Entrepreneurship;

JEL codes

  • D21: Firm Behavior: Theory
  • J33: Compensation Packages • Payment Methods
  • M12: Personnel Management • Executives; Executive Compensation
  • O31: Innovation and Invention: Processes and Incentives
  • O34: Intellectual Property and Intellectual Capital

Reference

Renato Gomes, Daniel Gottlieb, and Lucas Maestri, Experimentation and project selection: Screening and learning, Games and Economic Behavior, vol. 96, March 2016, pp. 145–169.

See also

Published in

Games and Economic Behavior, vol. 96, March 2016, pp. 145–169