Collusion, Delegation and Supervision with Soft Information

This paper shows that supervision with soft information is valuable whenever supervisors and supervisees collude under asymmetric information and proceeds then to derive an Equivalence Principle between organizational forms of supervisory and productive activities. We consider an organization with an agent privately informed on his productivity and a risk averse supervisor getting signals on the agent's type. In a centralized organization, the principal can communicate and contract with both the supervisor and the agent. However, these two agents can collude against the principal. In a decentralized organization, the principal only communicates and contracts with the supervisor who in turn sub-contracts with the agent. We show that the two organizations achieve the same outcome. We discuss this equivalence and provide various comparative statics results to assess the efficiency of supervisory structures.     

Optimal supervision with moral hazard

This paper adopts the principal–supervisor–agent hierarchy model pioneered by Tirole [Tirole, J., 1986. Hierarchies and bureaucracies: on the role of collusion in organizations. Journal of Law, Economics and Organization 2, 181–214] to analyze the optimal architecture of supervision. We consider a principal who encounters a double moral hazard problem. In particular, we examine the endogenously determined supervisory effort and the possibility of untruthful revelation of supervisor's message. The degree of accuracy for this endogenously chosen information architecture hinges upon the supervisory technology, the supervisor's reservation utility and the agent's production technology. Besides, though the principal's welfare would be lowered when the possibility of untruthful revelation is taken into account, we find that his desired supervisory effort level may be enhanced instead.     

Hidden information,bargaining power,and efficiency: an experiment

We devise an experiment to explore the effect of different degrees of bargaining power on the design and the selection of contracts in a hidden-information context. In our benchmark case, each principal is matched with one agent of unknown type. In our second treatment, a principal can select one of three agents, while in a third treatment an agent may choose between the contract menus offered by two principals. We first show theoretically how different ratios of principals and agents affect outcomes and efficiency. Informational asymmetries generate inefficiency. In an environment where principals compete against each other to hire agents, these inefficiencies may disappear, but they are insensitive to the number of principals. In contrast, when agents compete to be hired, efficiency improves dramatically, and it increases in the relative number of agents because competition reduces the agents’ informational monopoly power. However, this environment also generates a high inequality level and is characterized by multiple equilibria. In general, there is a fairly high degree of correspondence between the theoretical predictions and the contract menus actually chosen in each treatment. There is, however, a tendency to choose more ‘generous’ (and more efficient) contract menus over time. We find that competition leads to a substantially higher probability of trade, and that, overall, competition between agents generates the most efficient outcomes.     

Optimal incentive contracts with multiple agents

A setting in which a single principal contracts with two agents who possess perfect private information about their own productivity is considered. With correlated productivities, each agent's private information also provides a signal about the other agent's productivity. In contrast to the setting in which there is only one agent, it is shown that such private information may be of no value to the agents. It is only if the agents are risk-averse that their private information may allow them to command rents. Moreover, when the agents are constrained only to reveal their private information truthfully as a Nash equilibrium, the Pareto optimal incentive scheme may induce the agents to adopt strategies other than truth-telling. This leads to the consideration of truth-telling equilibria that are not Pareto dominated in the subgame played by the agents. Among all such equilibria, the one preferred by the principal restricts one agent to tell the truth as a dominant strategy and the other as a Nash response to truth.     

When vagueness induces indirect competition: strategic incompleteness of contracts

Summary. A class of employment contracts entailing production targets and consequent rewards is studied. In a nondiscriminatory environment, a principal hiring many agents faces the problem of writing a common contract which induces the highest possible effort from each one of his agents. While a very high target may get the best out of highly skilled agents, low skilled ones tend to shirk. On the other hand, although low targets make every agent put positive effort, there are efficiency losses from the high skilled agents. Also, in such environments the principal often has better information regarding the skills of all his agents than what each agent has regarding the rest of the agents at work. We show that if skills of agents are sufficiently close, the informed principal earns strictly higher profits by offering incomplete contracts as against being specific, as incomplete contracts reduce flow of information and induce indirect competition amongst agents. Received: May 19, 2000; revised version: August 28, 2001     

Present-biased preferences,self-awareness and shirking

We model a mechanism design problem in which the principal owns a project that requires work effort by an agent, but agents may have time-inconsistent, present-biased preferences and lack complete self-awareness of these preferences. The self-control problem and naïveté of an agent may lead him to agree to a contract but later shirk or slack-off, even though doing so is observable. When the principal cannot severely punish shirking and agents are completely naïve, the second-best solution entails allowing a present-biased agent to slack-off in order to avoid a greater loss due to shirking. With greater self-awareness among present-biased agents, the principal may do better by screening some from accepting the contract. Furthermore, when shirking can be severely punished, this does not lead to contracts that eliminate effects of the self control problem. Instead the principal may exploit present-biased agents by offering a contract that allows them to slack-off (which agents fail to foresee they will choose to do) but at the expense of foregoing much compensation.     

Reputation versus information: The delegation policy when the principal has reputational concerns

We analyze the delegation policy when the principal has reputational concerns. Both the principal and the agent can be either good or biased; the good players prefer the correct decision, while the biased ones prefer a high action even though it may be wrong. An evaluator who forms the principal's reputation may or may not be able to observe who makes the decision. When the evaluator cannot observe the allocation of authority, the principal shares the credit and blame with the agent. Although delegation can improve the quality of decision making because the agent has better information, it may also hurt the good principal's reputation because the high action may be taken by the biased agent while the blame will be shared when it is wrong. Thus, the good principal has a tendency to keep too much authority to maintain her reputation. By contrast, when the evaluator can observe the allocation of authority, delegation becomes a signaling device for the good type of principal to differentiate herself from the biased one. This results in an excessive allocation of authority toward the agent.     

Weakest-link public goods: Giving in-kind or transferring money

This paper extends the analysis of weakest-link public goods, whose level equals the smallest of the agents’ provision levels, by permitting an agent either to increase one's own provision or else augment both one's own provision and that of the other agent(s). Nash equilibria may be either symmetric with agents matching one another's provision or else asymmetric with an in-kind transfer by one agent to another. An equilibrium with cash transfers, but no in-kind transfers, may be Pareto superior to one with only in-kind transfers. If agents differ in their efficiency, then in-kind transfers by the low-cost agent may dominate a cash transfer. The possibility of Pareto-improving transfers is enhanced as the number of agents increases.     

Delegation versus centralization: The role of externalities

We study a simple contracting game with a principal and two agents. Contracts exert externalities on non-contractors. The principal can either contract both agents in a centralized manner, or delegate one agent to contract the other. We show that the choice of the principal depends on the sign of the externality. If this is positive, the principal prefers to delegate as long as the agency costs are not too high; if the externality is negative, the principal prefers to centralize for all sizes of agency costs.     

Individual accountability in teams

We consider a model of team production in which the principal observes only the team output, but agents can monitor one another (at a cost) and provide reports to the principal. We consider the problem faced by a principal who is prevented from penalizing an agent without evidence showing that the agent failed to complete his assigned actions. We show the first-best (high effort but no monitoring) can be achieved, but only if the principal assigns second-best actions. The principal requires monitoring, but agents do not monitor, and as long as output is high, the principal does not penalize agents who fail to monitor. If the principal has the responsibility for monitoring, the first-best outcome cannot be achieved, thus we identify an incentive for delegated monitoring even when agents have no informational advantage.     

Job design with sequential tasks and outcome externalities revisited

We revisit job design with sequential tasks and outcome externalities from a different perspective, extending Schmitz (2013a). When two sequential tasks need to be performed by wealth-constrained agents, the principal can hire only one agent or two different agents. When there exists an outcome externality in terms of the fixed cost and such an externality is not too large, if the two tasks are conflicting (resp. synergistic), then it is optimal for the principal to hire two different agents (resp. only one agent). When there exists an outcome externality regarding the marginal cost, the opposite result holds.     

Organizational Cultures of Corruption

Systematic differences in the incidence of corruption between countries can be explained by models of coordination failure that suggest that corruption can only be reduced by a “big push” across an entire economy. However, there is significant evidence that corruption is often sustained as an organizational culture, and can be combated with targeted effort in individual organizations one at a time. In this paper, we propose a model that reconciles these two theories of corruption. We explore a model of corruption with two principal elements. First, agents suffer a moral cost if their corruption behavior diverges from the level they perceive to be the social norm; second, the perception of the norm is imperfect; it gives more weight to the behavior of colleagues with whom the agent interacts regularly. This leads to the possibility that different organizations within the same country may stabilize at widely different levels of corruption. Furthermore, the level of corruption in an organization is persistent, implying that some organizations may have established internal “cultures” of corruption. The organizational foci are determined primarily by the opportunities and (moral) costs of corruption. Depending on the values of these parameters, the degree of corruption across departments may be relatively uniform or widely dispersed. These results also explain another surprising empirical observation: that in different countries similar government departments such as tax and education rank very differently relative to each other in the extent to which they are corrupt. This is difficult to explain in incentive‐based models if similar departments face similar incentives in different countries.     

Task assignment under agent loss aversion

We analyze a task-assignment model in which a principal assigns a task to one of two agents depending on future states. If the agents have concave utility, the principal assigns the task to them contingent on the state. We show that if the agents are loss averse, a state-independent assignment–assigning the task to a single agent in all states–can be optimal even when the principal can write a contingent contract at no cost.     

Coordination and discrimination in contracting with externalities: divide and conquer?

The paper studies bilateral contracting between N agents and one principal, whose trade with each agent generates externalities on other agents. It examines the effects of prohibiting the principal from (i) coordinating agents on her preferred equilibrium, and (ii) making different contracts available to different agents. These effects depend on whether an agent is more or less eager to trade when others trade more. The prohibitions reduce the aggregate trade in the former case, and have little or no effect in the latter case. The inefficiencies under different contracting regimes are linked to the sign of the relevant externalities, and are shown to be typically reduced by both prohibitions.     

A RATIONAL CHOICE EXPLANATION FOR STALIN'S "GREAT TERROR"

There is no agreement about the reasons for Stalin's Great Terror of 1937–1939. This paper argues that the problem faced by Stalin was similar to the standard principal–agent problem: the country was run as one enormous firm with Stalin as the only residual claimant. The monetary incentive structure was inadequate and the threat of mass shirking by the agents was real. A simple model of a principal with two agents is developed to address the problem. Assuming that the agents can observe and can reveal each other's shirking, it is shown that, under some assumptions, an equilibrium exists with the following strategy profiles: unless someone's shirking is revealed, the principal is committed to randomly punishing one of the agents with positive probability; an individual agent never shirks and always reveals a co-worker's shirking. A case study of the period is used to check the plausibility of this hypothesis.     

SHOULD YOU ALLOW YOUR EMPLOYEE TO BECOME YOUR COMPETITOR? ON NONCOMPETE AGREEMENTS IN EMPLOYMENT CONTRACTS*

We discuss a principal–agent model in which the principal has the opportunity to include a noncompete agreement in the employment contract. We show that not imposing such an agreement can be beneficial for the principal, as the possibility to leave the firm generates implicit incentives for the agent. The principal prefers to impose such a clause if and only if the value created is sufficiently small relative to the agent's outside option. If the principal can use an option contract for retaining the agent, she will never prefer a strict noncompete agreement.     

Moral Hazard and Renegotiation with Multiple Agents

We investigate the effects of contract renegotiation in multi-agentsituations where risk-averse agents negotiate a contract offer to theprincipal after the agents observe a common, unverifiable perfect signalabout their actions. We show that renegotiation with multiple agentsreduces the cost of implementing any implementable action profile downto the first-best level, even though the principal cannot observe theagents' actions. Moreover, it is sufficient for the principal to use a"simple" initial contract, in the sense that it consists of nomore than a single sharing scheme for each agent and the total payments tothe agents are the same regardless of the realised state. An importantimplication is that decentralization, in the sense of delegated negotiationand proposals from the agents, can be as effective as centralized schemesthat utilize revelation mechanisms in unrestricted ways.     

Dynamic yardstick mechanisms

This paper shows that the inability of principals to commit to long-term contracts is irrelevant when dealing with several agents whose private information is correlated. This sharply contrasts with the dynamics of contracting without such correlation. The paper also explores what limitations on yardstick mechanisms can justify the use of long-term contracts. We found that the inability of a principal to commit not to renegotiate long-term contracts is without consequence even if there is a bound on transfers that an agent can be asked to pay. In contrast, short-term contracting fails to implement the commitment solution with constraints on transfers. Second, absent current yardstick, the possibility of using correlated mechanisms in the future allows the principal to implement the first-best with a renegotiation-proof long-term contract whereas this cannot be achieved with short-term contracting.     

多代理人情形下的授权结构与激励

现有关于授权与激励的文献侧重于考察"是否授权"的问题。本文研究不同授权结构之间激励效果的比较。沿袭Aghion and Tirole(1997),本文在"一个委托人-两个代理人"的框架下,区分了"平行授权"、"优先授权"和"次第授权"三种授权结构。我们发现,项目带给代理人的净私人收益越大、代理人之间异质性越强、代理人之间的正外部性越弱(或负外部性越强),次第授权和优先授权越可能好过平行授权;反之,则平行授权越可能占优。当项目必须完成的时间越紧急,平行授权或优先授权越可能好过次第授权;反之,则次第授权越可能占优。我们的发现从激励和授权角度对组织(比如,董事会、公司、议会、政府机构)内部授权结构的一些现象提供了一些解释。     

Competition and the reform of incentive schemes in the regulated sector

We consider a regulation problem with complete contracting in a principal–agent model with adverse selection and review within this model the various channels by which external competition parameters affect incentives within the regulated firm. The channels are: the principal’s information, the principal’s objective function, the agent’s incentive constraint, the agent’s participation constraint. We consider in particular a better information structure, a threat of liquidation, a fight for talent, a more efficient private sector, and the existence of better substitutes. We characterize in each case the conditions under which the effect on incentives is positive.