We have considered the contract problem in which an agent invests is a project generating
private risky revenues that are subject to costly audit by a principal. The principal
can choose at any time to get a costly and imperfectly informative signal about future
revenues, whose realization is freely available to the agent. The question is: how does
the information in the signal control the debtors incentives? Should the principal get
the signal and if so when? What impact does the signal have on the audit strategy and
the structure of repayments in the contract?
Since the parties are risk neutral, acquiring the signal has no risk-sharing gain,
but the reduction in uncertainty allows the principal to update and sharpen his beliefs
about the prevalence of the incentive to cheat and may have incentive effects that reduce deadweight losses. There are three factors involved in the signal acquisition decision.
Firstly, since collecting the signal reduces the uncertainty about future revenues, it
allows the contract to be written with more precise separation of the possible types of
agent. Secondly, since both the signal and audit are costly, it allows for a trade-off in control devices between paying to reduce uncertainty by getting a signal and paying
for auditing. Thirdly, there are incentive effects of the signal, which work indirectly
through the principal’s participation constraint and the agent’s truthtelling constraint
that allow reduction in the deadweight loss of audits