The purpose of this paper is to provide an introductory overview of the agency theory problems faced by the contracting parties in the credit market contracts. The paper is written in the form of literature survey. It emphasizes the main interesting results and provides a number of references to the original articles, surveys and textbooks where these briefly outlined results are treated in more detail. Agency theory has been a very successful and active research area in economics, finance, management and related subjects all the time since the beginning of the seventies. The recent graduate textbook in economics written by two top theoreticians in this area Bolton and Dewatripont (2005) highlights that a number of founding contributors of agency theory – Ronald Coase, Herbert Simon, William Vickrey, James Mirrlees, George Akerlof, Joseph Stiglitz, Michal Spence – have been rewarded with the Nobel prize in economics. Therefore it is not a surprise to see in the Czech economic journals a growing number of papers using the agency theory approach to many problems in diverse subfields of economics and finance. The agency theory was used to answer questions in economics of transition, which is one of profiling areas of Czech economic research. Janda (2000, 2003, 2005) analyzes the problems of credit provision in transition economies in the classical agency theory setting of informational asymmetry between principal and agent. Turnovec (2000) deals with the hierarchical principal-agent problem in the analysis of the ownership structure, which is one of the principal topics of the economy of transition. The questions of ownership structure and privatization are analysed also by Kapieka (2000), who concludes that both the right to cash-flow and the right to control should be transferred to the new owner during the privatization. One the concerns of this paper is with the soft budget constraints, which are analysed by Janda (2002) and Knot and Vychodil (2005) in the context of optimal bankruptcy procedures design. The research interest of Knot and Vychodil (2005) in the law design is also shared by Bortel (2004), who deals with the economic analysis of law with a special emphasize on the issues of contracting and agency.