Collusion in homogeneous and heterogeneous tournaments

In tournaments, only the relative performance of agents is important. Therefore, the agents have an incentive to collude by jointly deviating to low effort levels. Previous papers on collusion have proposed to make the tournament asymmetric to prevent agents from colluding. However, by allowing side payments between the agents and focusing on implicit enforcement of collusion, the current study demonstrates that this is not true. Often, the principal prefers to hire homogeneous agents to make collusions less stable.     

Splitting Leagues

Splitting leagues or tournaments is puzzling when agents are homogeneous and splitting leads to a negative competition effect. However, a principal can benefit from splitting under some circumstances. First, splitting can be used as a divide-and-rule strategy by the principal to create additional incentives when collusion among the agents is possible. Second, splitting leagues gives the principal the opportunity to introduce promotions and relegations between nested tournaments.     

Incentives and managerial effort under competitive pressure: An experiment

We investigate how increased competition affects firm owners׳ incentives and managers׳ efforts in a laboratory experiment. Each owner offers a compensation scheme to his manager in two different conditions: under monopoly and under Cournot duopoly. Following acceptance of the compensation, the manager chooses an effort level to increase the probability of a cost-reduction which affects the firm׳s profit. According to standard theoretical predictions the entry of a rival firm in a monopolistic industry affects negatively both the incentive compensation and the effort level. Our experimental findings show that the entry of a rival firm has two effects on managerial effort: an internalization effect which affects positively the level of effort and an income effect which has a negative impact on effort. The combined outcome of these two effects is neutral with respect to managerial effort: we observe that when competition reduces the firm׳s profit, the owner reacts by offering lower incentives but despite the lower incentives the manager still accepts the contract offer and exerts the same level of effort than under the monopoly condition.     

Team production,endogenous learning about abilities and career concerns

This paper studies career concerns in teams where the support a worker receives depends on fellow team members׳ efforts and abilities. In this setting, by exerting effort and providing support, a worker can influence her own and her teammates׳ project outputs in order to bias the learning process in her favor. To manipulate the market׳s assessment, we argue that in equilibrium, a worker has incentives to help or even sabotage her colleagues in order to signal that she is of higher ability. In a multiperiod stationary framework, we show that the stationary level of work effort is above and help effort is below their efficient levels.     

Collusion Under Asymmetric Information: The Role of the Correlation

We consider the regulation of a duopoly under incomplete information. When firms act noncooperatively, the regulator uses yardstick mechanisms to bridge his informational gap at no cost. However, this provides the firms with an incentive to collude.
We interpret the correlation as a measure of the congruence/divergence between individual and coalitional incentives. Under positive correlation, these incentives are aligned: the threat of collusion forces the regulator to distort the allocation. Under negative correlation, these incentives are opposed: the regulator can, sometimes, exploit this conflict of interest inside the coalition to eradicate the stakes of collusion at no cost.     

代理人能力分布不均情形下首位晋升制与末位淘汰制的比较研究

在基于相对业绩比较的锦标赛激励机制中,首位晋升制与末位淘汰制是两种常见的竞赛激励机制。在代理人能力分布不均情形下,将代理人之间的拆台行为引入传统的锦标赛模型,可以研究代理人能力分布不同时首位晋升制与末位淘汰制下代理人的行为以及对委托人收益的影响。通过数理模型推导可获得以下结论:第一,首位晋升制下代理人的努力水平和拆台水平均比较高,委托人采用首位晋升制更有利,能力分布对委托人最优选择不产生影响。第二,低能力代理人占多数时,高能力代理人努力水平过高,受到的拆台也更多,高能力代理人占多数时,低能力代理人努力水平更高受到的拆台更多,能力分布对代理人的行为产生影响。     

On the Competition of Asymmetric Agents

Abstract. Rank-order tournaments are usually implemented in organizations to provide incentives for eliciting employees' effort and/or to identify the agent with the higher ability, for example in promotion tournaments. We close a gap in the literature by experimentally analyzing a ceteris paribus variation of the prize spread – being the major design feature of tournaments – in a symmetric and an asymmetric setting. We find that effort significantly increases with the prize spread as predicted by standard theory. However, only for sufficiently large prize spreads weak players competing against strong players strain themselves all the more and sorting of agents is feasible.     

Participation incentives in rank order tournaments with endogenous entry

Rank order tournaments, in which the payment to an agent is based upon relative observed performance, are a commonly used compensation scheme. In practice, agents often compete in some (but not all) events in a set of tournaments. The present study considers two mutually exclusive tournaments, in which agents themselves decide which event to enter. An agent bases this decision upon the combination of three distinct effects: a prize effect, a winning probability effect, and an effort cost effect. The precise impact of each of these effects is analyzed. Of particular interest is the possibility that a field of higher quality may be attracted to the event with smaller prizes.      

The Welfare Effects of Incentive Schemes

This paper computes the change in welfare associated with the introduction of incentives. We calculate by how much the welfare gains of increased output due to incentives outweigh workers' disutility from increased effort. We accomplish this by studying the use of incentives by a firm in the check-clearing industry. Using this firm's production records, we model and estimate the worker's dynamic effort decision problem. We find that the firm's incentive scheme has a large effect on productivity, raising it by 12% over the sample period for the average worker. Using our parameter estimates, we show that the cost of increased effort due to incentives is equal to the dollar value of a 5% rise in productivity. Welfare is measured as the output produced minus the cost of effort; hence, the net increase in the average worker's welfare due to the introduction of the firm's bonus plan is 7%. Under a first-best scheme, we find that the net increase in welfare is 9%.     

Interlinking and Collusion

In this paper, we suggest a new rationale for the existence of interlinked contracts in the agrarian economies of developing countries. Using the framework of an infinitely repeated game with discounting, we show that interlinked contracts can help the dominant parties to collude, in cases where collusion is not possible with noninterlinked contracts. This occurs because either interlinkage pools incentive constraints across markets, or it affects the incentives of agents to accept deviating contracts. We illustrate these mechanisms by considering the case of interlinkage between markets for credit and share tenancy. The model that is used to formalize the second mechanism is characterized by frictions in the tenancy market, which we model using the standard framework of search and matching.     

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.     

Tournaments with Prize‐setting Agents*

In some tournaments, it is the contestants themselves who determine reward allocation. Union members bargain over wage distribution, and some firms allow self‐managed teams to freely determine internal resource allocation, incentive structure, and division of labor. We analyze, and test experimentally, a tournament where heterogeneous agents determine the spread between winner prize and loser prize. We investigate the relationship between prize spread, uncertainty, heterogeneity, and effort. We find that a large prize spread is associated with a low degree of uncertainty and a high degree of heterogeneity, and that heterogeneity triggers effort. By and large, our real‐effort experiment supports the theoretical predictions.     

Cartel formation and managerial incentives

We study the formation of cartels within two different contexts. First, we consider internal–external stability based models which, due to firms’ free-riding incentives, lead to the inexistence of stable cartels. Second, we introduce the dynamic aspect of coalition formation. That is, when considering a cartel we consider also any cartel that can be reached through a succession of moves. Despite firms’ free-riding incentive, the dynamic process predicts that the collusion of the whole industry can occur with some regularity. We show that free-riding incentives decrease and incentives to merge increase when firms’ owner delegate production decisions to managers.      

MARKET‐BASED INCENTIVES

In this article, we study market‐induced, external incentives similar to career concerns jointly with standard, contractual incentives linking compensation to performance. We consider a dynamic principal–agent problem in which the agent's outside option is determined endogenously in a competitive labor market. In equilibrium, strong performance increases the agent's market value. When this value becomes sufficiently high, the threat of the agent quitting forces the principal to increase the agent's compensation. The prospect of obtaining this raise gives the agent an incentive to exert effort, which reduces the need for standard incentives. In fact, whenever the agent's option to quit is sufficiently close to being “in the money,” the market‐induced incentive eliminates the need for standard incentives altogether: Compensation becomes completely insensitive to current performance.     

On the Incentive Effects of Sample Size in Monitoring Agents – A Theoretical and Experimental Analysis

When agents compete for a bonus and their productivity in each of several possible occasions depends stochastically on (constant) effort, the number of times this is checked to assign the bonus affects the level of uncertainty in the selection process. Uncertainty, in turn, is expected to increase the effort made by competing agents (Cowen and Glazer, 1996; Dubey and Haimanko, 2003; Dubey and Wu, 2001). Theoretical predictions are derived and experimental evidence is collected for two competing agents, with the bonus awarded to that agent who outperforms the other. Sampling occasions (1 or 3), cost of production (high or low), cost symmetry (asymmetric or symmetric), and piece‐rate reward are manipulated factorially to test the robustness of the effects of uncertainty. For control, a single‐agent case is included. Results indicate that, for tournaments, greater uncertainty does indeed lead to greater than expected effort and lower average variable costs.     

The effects of imperfect auditing on managerial compensation

We study the optimal shareholder–manager contract having the property to induce the manager to exert high effort and truthfully reveal firm performance. This contract design problem is solved under the assumption of imperfect auditing, either because of mistakes or because of collusion between managers and auditors. The imperfection of the audit technology is costless up to a threshold, beyond which it causes a distortion in the incentive compatible contract or even prevents its existence. This result may help explain the observed decline in the use of stock options, tracing it back to an unfocused activity or poor performance of auditors.     

POSITIVE SELF‐IMAGE IN TOURNAMENTS*

This article analyzes the implications of worker overestimation of productivity for firms in which incentives take the form of tournaments. Each worker overestimates his productivity but is aware of the bias in his opponent's self‐assessment. The manager of the firm, on the other hand, correctly assesses workers' productivities and self‐beliefs when setting tournament prizes. The article shows that, under a variety of circumstances, firms can benefit from worker positive self‐image. The article also shows that worker positive self‐image can improve welfare in tournaments. In contrast, workers' utility declines due to their own misguided choices.     

A comparison of cardinal tournaments and piece rate contracts with liquidity constrained agents

A celebrated result in the theory of tournaments is that relative performance evaluation (tournaments) is a superior compensation method to absolute performance evaluation (piece rate contracts) when the agents are risk-averse, the principal is risk-neutral or less risk-averse than the agents and production is subject to common shocks that are large relative to the idiosyncratic shocks. This is because tournaments get closer to the first best by filtering common uncertainty. This paper shows that, surprisingly, tournaments are superior even when agents are liquidity constrained so that transfers to them cannot fall short of a predetermined level. The rationale is that, by providing insurance against common shocks through a tournament, payments to the agents in unfavorable states increase and payments in favorable states decrease which enables the principal to satisfy tight liquidity constraints for the agents without paying any ex ante rents to them, while simultaneously providing higher-power incentives than under piece rates. The policy implication of our analysis is that firms should adopt relative performance evaluation over absolute performance evaluation regardless of whether the agents are liquidity (wealth) constrained or not.     

Wealth Effects, Incentives, and Productivity

Comparative static effects of varying the wealth level of a risk-averse agent in a moral hazard setting with limited liability constraints are investigated. There are two principal opposing effects of increasing wealth: the incentive effect, which allows stronger punishments for poor performance, thereby encouraging higher effort; and the preference effect, which reduces the agent's effort incentives owing to income effects in the demand for leisure. It is shown that optimal effort levels are initially constant, subsequently increasing and eventually decreasing in wealth. Hence agents with intermediate wealth levels are the most productive.