技术许可中道德风险问题的价格契约治理机制研究

本文利用现代契约经济学基本理论，对同一技术条件下、由技术使用者替代性投入行为而产生的道德风险问题的价格契约治理机制进行了分析。分析结果表明，技术所有者总可以设计一种分离价格契约治理道德风险问题，其中，对自己偏好的高成本投入行为采用纯固定费用，而对低成本投入行为采用“固定费用＋提成费”。本文进一步认为，价格契约中提成费比率对成本效率较高的投入行为所造成的扭曲程度，要大干成本效率较低的投入行为。     

技术许可中道德风险问题的价格契约治理机制研究

本文利用现代契约经济学基本理论,对同一技术条件下、由技术使用者替代性投入行为而产生的道德风险问题的价格契约治理机制进行了分析。分析结果表明,技术所有者总可以设计一种分离价格契约治理道德风险问题,其中,对自己偏好的高成本投入行为采用纯固定费用,而对低成本投入行为采用“固定费用 提成费”。本文进一步认为,价格契约中提成费比率对成本效率较高的投入行为所造成的扭曲程度,要大于成本效率较低的投入行为。     

Pessimistic information gathering

An agent gathers information on productivity shocks and accordingly produces on behalf of a principal. Information gathering is imperfect and whether it succeeds or not depends on the agent's effort. Contracting frictions come from the fact that the agent is pessimistic on the issue of information gathering, and there are both moral hazard in information gathering, private information on productivity shocks and moral hazard on operating effort. An optimal menu of linear contracts mixes high-powered, productivity-dependent screening options following “good news” with a fixed low-powered option otherwise.     

Incentive contracts in delegated portfolio management under VaR constraint

This paper studies the incentive effect of linear performance-adjusted contracts in delegated portfolio management under a value-at-risk (VaR) constraint. It is shown that a linear performance-based contract can provide incentives for the portfolio manager to work at acquiring private information under a VaR risk constraint. The expected utility and optimal effort of a risk-averse manager are increasing functions of the return sharing ratio in the contract. However, a risk constraint causes the portfolio manager to reduce effort in gathering private information, suggesting that the VaR constraint increases the moral hazard between the investor and the manager.     

二级供应链中代理人的甄别与激励研究

文章分析了由一个制造商与一个分销商所组成的二级供应链中,既存在契约签订之前的逆向选择问题又存在契约签订之后的道德风险问题这一情况下,制造商对分销商的类型甄别及努力激励的机制设计问题。主要得到以下结论：①制造商可以通过努力收益分享的方式激励销售商投入最优的努力水平,进而规避道德风险行为。②制造商通过设计一组激励相容机制可以达到甄别分销商类型的目的,但必须支付给高销售能力分销商一定的租金。③高销售能力分销商的销量水平不存在扭曲,而低销售能力分销商的销量水平向下扭曲,其原因在于制造商降低给低销售能力分销商规定的销量就能够降低支付给高销售能力分销商的信息租金。文章从供应链中逆向选择与道德风险共存的角度对供应链委托代理关系进行研究,得出结论为供应链中的委托代理双方提供了一定的决策依据。     

道德风险条件下高校产学研合作中价格契约研究

利用技术许可中价格契约的基本理论,对高校产学研合作中存在于企业的道德风险问题的价格契约治理机制进行了分析。分析结果表明,在产学研合作中,当企业存在道德风险问题时,一个次优产学研合作的价格契约是一个纯固定费用的价格契约;同时,高校为了对企业进行有效激励,将对企业进行一定的信息租的转移。     

HOW TO DESIGN INFRASTRUCTURE CONTRACTS IN A WARMING WORLD: A CRITICAL APPRAISAL OF PUBLIC–PRIVATE PARTNERSHIPS*

We analyze how long‐term uncertainty, for example, regarding future climate conditions, affects the design of concession contracts and organizational forms in a principal–agent context, with dynamic moral hazard, limited liability, and irreversibility constraints. The prospect of future, uncertain productivity shocks on the returns on the firm's effort creates an option value of delaying efforts, a course that exacerbates agency costs. Contracts and organizational forms are drafted to control this cost of delegated flexibility. The possibility for the agent to delay investment in response to uncertainty and irreversibility also elicits preference for unbundling different stages of the project through short‐term contracts. Our analysis is relevant to infrastructure sectors that are sensitive to changing weather conditions and sheds a pessimistic light on the relevance of public–private partnerships in this context.     

Progressive Taxation, Moral Hazard, and Entrepreneurship

This paper considers the general equilibrium and welfare effects of a linear progressive income tax with entrepreneurship and moral hazard. A competitive intermediation sector diversifies risk associated with entrepreneurial activity, but full risk consolidation is prevented by moral hazard. Since effort is not observable, risk bearing of entrepreneurs is required for incentive reasons. The extent of risk consolidation is endogenously explained. We find that a nonredistributive tax is neutral. A progressive tax always impairs entrepreneurship while the effect on welfare can be positive or zero, depending on the specification of moral hazard. Some results may also depend on the concrete formulation of preferences.     

CONTINGENT AND NONCONTINGENT ATTORNEYS' FEES IN PERSONAL INJURY CASES

Fee structures determine the economic incentives for lawyer performance. A certain hourly fee promotes excessive legal work, while a contingent fee leads to insufficient attorney effort. Competition among lawyers for enhanced reputation helps mitigate these effects, though client welfare still is not maximized. Clients' monitoring of attorney conduct often is necessary, but the expense of such monitoring limits its usefulness. This study concludes that the contingent fee may be a second-best solution to the problem of regulating lawyer performance.     

Dynamic labor contracts with temporary layoffs and permanent separations

Summary. We study the implications of optimal dynamic contracts in private information environments for fluctuations in effort and employment across time and productivity states. To this end, we incorporate temporary layoffs and permanent separations as well as on-the-job effort variations into a dynamic model of moral hazard. We consider two different “commitment” environments. In a “full commitment” environment, although the firm can temporarily lay a worker off, neither party can dissolve the contractual relationship once it has been initiated. On the other hand, in a “limited commitment” environment, both parties can dissolve the relationship at the beginning of any period in order to pursue an outside option. We use our model to study the implications of optimal contracts for incentives, employment histories, layoffs and separations across full information, full commitment and limited commitment settings. We compute solutions to the relevant principal-agent problems, endogenously determining the set of states in which separations occur and the domain of the firm's value function, as well as the value function itself. Received: February 28, 2000; revised version: January 21, 2001     

Double Moral Hazard,Monitoring, and the Nature of Contracts

generalized double-sided moral-hazard model, with risk-averse parties who mutually monitor each other (to get a reasonable idea of outcome/effort). The model considers trade-off between monitoring costs and moral hazard costs, which are endogenously determined by the extent of monitoring. Using this model, we formally prove a generalized version of Coase's conjecture – that the optimal contract minimizes the agency and risk costs. We then show how varying assumptions about the feasibility or cost of monitoring of the outcome or the worker's effort lead to different contracts being optimal. The analysis is then used to explain the nature of contracts observed in practice under many different situations. We will give an explanation as to why industrial workers typically work under wage contracts, while share contracts are common in agriculture and will explain why profit sharing is more common for senior managers than for the production workers. Received September 19, 2000; revised version received October 30, 1997     

Land Tenancy and Non-Contractible Investment in Rural Pakistan

Commitment failure lies at the core of incomplete contract theory, yet its quantitative significance has rarely been assessed. Using detailed plot-level data from rural Pakistan, we find that non-contractible investment is underprovided on tenanted land, even after controlling for the endogeneity of leasing decisions. Our evidence also indicates that moral hazard in investment effort alone cannot explain this inefficiency. Instead, imperfect commitment appears to be the driving mechanism, since even plots taken on fixed rent contracts where all the rent is paid upfront receive lower investment than owner-cultivated plots. We further show that a considerable portion of the variation in tenancy duration, and hence in the security of tenure, is due to heterogeneity across landlords. One interpretation of this finding is that landlord reputation is important in mitigating hold-up.     

Chasing the carrot – actual working hours of fixed-term employees

Fixed-term contracts can serve as a screening device to reveal the true ability of workers. To achieve promotion to a permanent position, fixed-term employees have an incentive to prove themselves by providing higher effort than competing co-workers by means of longer working hours. Applying fixed effects estimation to the German register data, we find that employees work longer hours on fixed-term contracts. This effect is stronger for labour market entrants and employees that are newly hired. We further show that actual hours of work are particularly large when there is competition among co-workers to receive promotion to a permanent position.     

Taxation of uncertain business profits,private risk markets and optimal allocation of risk

In this paper we explore what happens if the government bears some of the risk through a profit tax when the risk sharing in the venture capital market is incomplete due to non-observability of effort and moral hazard. If the external equity investors can enforce exclusive contracts with the entrepreneurs, the risk relief through a profit tax will lead to too much insurance and too low effort as compared with a second best optimal solution. Bond and Devereux [Bond, S.R. and Devereux, M.P. (1995). On the design of a neutral business tax under uncertainty. Journal of Public economics, 58, 57–71.] show that a proportional profit tax would be neutral in the absence of moral hazard. In the presence of moral hazard we demonstrate that the tax may affect the risk shifting through the market, in which case the premise for the neutrality result will no longer hold.     

Contingency Fees, Settlement Delay, and Low-Quality Litigation: Empirical Evidence from Two Datasets

Although flat fees are common for divorces, wills and trusts,and probate, lawyers in personal injury cases generally arepaid by contingency fee or at an hourly rate. Arguments havebeen made that contingency fees increase low-quality, "frivolous"litigation but counterarguments suggest that contingency feesactually limit such litigation and instead it is hourly feesthat increase low-quality litigation. Using a difference indifferences test and data on a cross section of states in 1992,we test whether legal quality is lower under contingency orhourly fees. We also examine medical malpractice claims in Floridausing a time series centered around a law change that limitedcontingency fees. We also examine the impact of fee arrangementson the expected time to settlement. We find that hourly feesencourage the filing of low-quality suits and increase the timeto settlement (i.e., contingency fees increase legal qualityand decrease the time to settlement).     

Minimum payments and induced effort in moral hazard problems

Consider a moral hazard problem in which there is a constraint to pay the agent no less than some amount m. This paper studies the effect of changes in m on the effort that the principal chooses to induce from the agent. We present sufficient conditions on the informativeness of the signal observed by the principal and on the agentʼs utility under which when m increases, induced effort (and hence productivity) falls. We also study how the cost minimizing contract for any given effort level varies in m. We present an efficient algorithm for numerically calculating optimal contracts for given parameters and show that induced effort falls when m is increased in many cases even when our sufficient conditions fail.     

Moral hazard,insurance claims,and repeated insurance contracts

Abstract The paper develops a simple model of repeated automobile insurance contracts, providing a framework for analyzing changes in aggregate insurance data in periods of changes that affect driver incentives. Experience rating of premiums gives drivers an incentive to exert effort to avoid accidents (ex ante moral hazard), and an incentive to hide accidents (ex post moral hazard). The empirical analysis, using data from the competitive insurance markets in Ontario and Alberta over a period of major legislative changes in Ontario, suggests that much of the recent decline in accidents in Ontario was due to an increased incentive to hide accidents.     

NONSTATIONARY RELATIONAL CONTRACTS WITH ADVERSE SELECTION*

I develop a model of nonstationary relational contracts in order to study internal wage dynamics. Workers are heterogeneous, and each worker’s ability is both private information and fixed for all time. Learning therefore occurs within employment relationships. The inferences, however, are confounded by moral hazard. Incentive provision is restricted by an inability to commit to long‐term contracts. Relational contracts, which must be self‐enforcing, must therefore be used. The wage dynamics in the optimal contract, which are pinned down by the tension between incentive provision and contractual enforcement, are intimately related to the learning effect.     

Limited liability and the underlying-asset constraint: on the use of share-derivative contracts to resolve agency problems

The issue of whether agency problems can be resolved by using standard derivative contracts continues to interest students of incentive structures of organizations. In this paper, we identify under limited liability a necessary and sufficient condition for standard share-derivative contracts to resolve moral hazard problems. This condition is remarkably simple: in addition to having large enough expected profit, the insiders of the firm must be able to hold combinations of call and put options in excess of the available underlying assets. Feasibility of delivery makes this condition not credible in the capital markets. Therefore, to circumvent this constraint one must have resort to private arrangements. This explains why incentive contracts often involve elements such as bonuses, penalties, and promotions, that are not able to be mimicked by standard derivative contracts.     

Moral hazard and Marshallian inefficiency: Evidence from Tunisia

We formalize the link between optimal cost-sharing contracts and the production technology in the presence of moral hazard by appealing to several well-known results from duality theory. Building on intuitions from the interlinkage literature, we show that optimal contractual structure is determined by the (i) substitution possibilities that exist between different observable factor inputs, as well as (ii) between these inputs and unobservable effort. We endogenize contractual choice using landlord characteristics as instruments, exploiting the fact that, in our dataset, landlords interact with several tenants and vice versa. The approach is applied to an unbalanced plot-level panel of cost-sharing contracts in a Tunisian village, using a translog representation of the restricted profit function. Contractual terms are found to be a significant determinant of input use and therefore lead to Marshallian inefficiency, while the optimality of the underlying contractual structure is rejected.