This paper studies project financing when the entrepreneur derives reputation benefits from investor backing and learns privately about failure. Continued backing improves the market's perception of the project and gives the entrepreneur a reason to delay disclosure. The investor designs a contract to obtain failure information while controlling funding and compensation costs. I show the optimal contract features early discipline, with prompt disclosure and termination, followed by failure tolerance, with delayed disclosure. Allowing delay later weakens the market's interpretation of continued funding and reduces the cost of inducing early disclosure. The model predicts a startup hype cycle, bimodal termination times and systematic variation in failure tolerance across investors and ventures.

This paper studies financial contracting between an entrepreneur and an investor whose expertise about the economic environment gives him private information about project quality. The project can succeed or fail, with its success probability depending on quality and the entrepreneur's unobservable effort. The entrepreneur proposes a contract to raise financing and elicit this information. The investor prefers a higher success payment and greater effort. However, a higher payment reduces the entrepreneur's residual return and hence her effort. When the probability of success is log‑supermodular, the constraint preventing underreporting binds in the optimal separating contract. This feedback can make the contract discontinuous in the initial prior about project quality. The outcomes of good and bad projects converge during economic downturns and diverge during booms. Overconfidence can reduce total surplus, while mild underconfidence can increase it.

We study price discrimination in markets where consumers search across firms and obtain discounts by incurring time costs. Consumers differ in their valuation of time relative to money, shaping both search behavior and menu choice. Under regularity conditions, firms pool consumers with low and high time costs and screen intermediate types through higher prices and shorter time requirements. When screening occurs, prices jump at its lower boundary but remain continuous at its upper boundary. Screening also lowers the top price relative to uniform pricing for the same consumer group: raising it would increase the time costs needed to preserve incentive compatibility elsewhere in the menu.