Screening for breakthroughs
2025-11-17
How best to incentivize prompt disclosure? We study this question in a general model in which a technological breakthrough occurs at an uncertain time and is privately observed by an agent, and a principal must incentivize disclosure via her control of a payoff‐relevant physical allocation. We uncover a deadline structure of optimal mechanisms: they have a simple deadline form in an important special case, and a graduated deadline structure in general. We apply our results to the design of unemployment insurance schemes.