Teams with moral hazard and non-verifiable quality assessment

•We study a static moral hazard setting with non-contractible quality.•The buyer privately observes quality before trade.•Sellers have private information about the cost and choice of effort.•The buyer prefers to contract with a team rather than with each seller individually.

This paper shows that buying from a team of sellers can be optimal for the buyer in a static model where the buyer has private information about quality, sellers have private information about the cost and choice of effort, and quality is not contractible.