Informed principal with correlation

In this paper we analyze an adverse selection model with one principal and one agent, who are both risk neutral and have private information. We assume that the private information of the principal is correlated with that of the agent. The main result of the paper is that the principal can extract a larger share of the surplus from the agent than in the case where her information is public. The principal can design such a contract because she exploits the fact that her type is an informative signal on the agent's one. We fully characterize the equilibrium of the game in which different types of principal offer the same menu of contracts that leaves the agent uninformed about the principal's type. This gives more freedom to the principal when setting the transfers because the agent's constraints need to hold only at an interim stage.     

Multistage Contracting with Applications to R&D and Insurance Policies

An agent undertakes a nonobservable first‐stage effort. The principal observes whether the effort results in a successful project or not. If the project succeeds, only the firm observes its interim quality, and can further improve it with a nonobservable second‐stage effort. If the agent accepts penalties when the first‐stage fails, moral hazard and asymmetric information do not prevent the principal from implementing her first‐best outcome. However, if the agent is bounded by the maximum loss he can bear when the first‐stage fails (limited liability), the principal induces the agent to exert a first‐stage effort below the first‐best level and a second‐stage effort above the first‐best level when the interim quality of his project is low. This distortion in efforts implies that the ex post rent left to the agent with a project of high interim quality is above the first‐best level. This provides a rationale for the optimality of expanding the use of the “carrot” (second‐stage rent) when the use of the “stick” (first‐stage penalty) is restricted. Implications of the theory for R&D, bank, job, and insurance contracts are discussed.     

Competition between asymmetrically informed principals

Summary. This paper derives the set of equilibria for common agency games in which the principals compete in piece rates and lump sum payments and one principal has incomplete information about the agent's preferences. We show that the uninformed principal's expected payoff function is discontinuous with respect to the identity of the marginal agent type. This discontinuity is shown to support an open set of equilibria. For games in which the first-best equilibrium strategies are measurable with respect to the uninformed principal's information partition, this result implies the existence of an open set of Pareto inefficient equilibria. Received: December 5, 1995; revised version August 18, 1996     

Contracting with Diversely Naive Agents

In standard contract-theoretic models, the underlying assumption is that agent types differ in their preference or cost parameters, and the principal's objective is to design contracts in order to screen this type. We study a contract-theoretic model in which the heterogeneity among agent types is of a "cognitive" nature. In our model, the agent has dynamically inconsistent preferences. Agent types differ only in their degree of "sophistication", that is, their ability to forecast the change in their future tastes. We fully characterize the menu of contracts which the principal offers in order to screen the agent's sophistication. The menu does not exclude any type: it provides a perfect commitment device for relatively sophisticated types, and "exploitative" contracts which involve speculation with relatively naive types. More naive types are more heavily exploited and generate a greater profit for the principal. Our results allow us to interpret real-life contractual arrangements in a variety of industries.     

Efficiency Defense in EU and US Horizontal Merger Control if Costs are Endogenous

If fixed costs are endogenous, following from profit maximization, horizontal mergers are always profitable. They cause the price to rise and consumer surplus to decrease. A case of horizontal merger in which, according to the requirement of US and EU Merger Guidelines for an efficiency defense to be acceptable, the price declines or remains constant does not exist and therefore cannot be expected by profit maximizing partners to arise following a merger. Merger control should be guided by focusing on total welfare. Permitting cooperation in R&D, although profitable, is likely to be detrimental to welfare.     

The costs and benefits of additional information in agency models with endogenous information structures

We study the effect of additional private information in an agency model with an endogenous information structure. If more private information becomes available to the agent, this may hurt the agent, benefit the principal, and affect the total surplus ambiguously.     

Does Team-Based Compensation Give Rise to Problems When Agents Vary in Their Ability?

This paper reports the results of an experiment on how team heterogeneity in terms of productivity influences both the revenue sharing proposed by the principal to the team and the employees' performance. Experimental evidence shows that when the team is heterogeneous, the principal does not try to motivate the agents through her sharing offer. Regardless of the level of team-based compensation, a large amount of free riding occurs since each agent is mainly influenced by his teammate's behavior. In contrast, when the team is homogeneous, agents are better able to cooperate, reciprocating the principal's offer.     

Authority and Communication in Organizations

This paper studies delegation as an alternative to communication. We show that a principal prefers to delegate control to a better informed agent rather than to communicate with this agent as long as the incentive conflict is not too large relative to the principal's uncertainty about the environment. We further identify cases in which the principal optimally delegates control to an "intermediary", and show that keeping a veto–right typically reduces the expected utility of the principal unless the incentive conflict is extreme.     

利益最大化实现的法律思考

利益最大化是市场经济主体的普遍追求。追求利益最大化的界限就是主体在不侵害他人利益最大化和社会利益最大化的合理范围内实现各自利益最大化。市场调节机制在调整利益实现过程中的作用是显而易见的,但也是有限的,民商法是保障利益最大化实现的基础性法律,经济法则以社会总体经济效益和社会利益为其立法本位,二共同构成了利益最大化实现的保证。     

Optimal use of correlated information in mechanism design when full surplus extraction may be impossible

We study the mechanism design problem when the principal can condition the agent's transfers on the realization of ex post signals that are correlated with the agent's types. Crémer and McLean [Econometrica 53(1985) 345-361; 56(1988) 1247-1257], McAfee and Reny [Econometrica 60(2)(1992) 395-421], and Riordan and Sappington [J. Econ. Theory, 45(1988) 189-199] studied situations where the signals are such that full surplus can be extracted from every agent type. We study optimal utilization of the signals when there are fewer signals than types and the Riordan and Sappington conditions do not always hold. For some special cases, we show the level of surplus that can be extracted, and identify the agent types who obtain rent.     

Communication in bargaining over decision rights

This paper develops a model of bargaining over decision rights between an uninformed principal and an informed but self-interested agent. We introduce two different bargaining mechanisms: tacit and explicit bargaining. In tacit bargaining, an uninformed principal makes a take-it-or-leave-it price offer to the agent, who then decides whether to accept or reject the offer. In the equilibrium of the game, the principal inefficiently screens out some agent types so that the agent's private information cannot be fully utilized when the decision is made. In explicit bargaining in which parties can communicate explicitly via cheap talk before tacit bargaining, however, an equilibrium with no such inefficient screening exists even when the conflict of interest is arbitrarily large. We also follow a mechanism design approach, showing that under certain conditions, explicit bargaining is an optimal bargaining mechanism that maximizes the joint surplus of the parties.     

Fan welfare maximization as a club objective in a professional sports league

Motivated by aspects of European soccer club governance (members' clubs supporters' trusts), a first formal analysis of fan welfare maximization as a club objective in a sports league is provided, with comparisons to objectives studied previously (profit and win maximization). Positive comparisons focus on team qualities, ticket prices, attendances and the impact of capacity crowds; empirically observed ticket black markets and inelastic pricing are consistent only with fan welfare maximization. Normatively, social welfare (aggregate league surplus) is well-served by a league of fan welfare maximizers, or sometimes win maximizers, but not profit maximizers; leagues should not normally make profits.     

Optimal delegation with multi-dimensional decisions

This paper investigates optimal mechanisms in a principal–agent framework with a two-dimensional decision space, quadratic payoffs and no monetary transfers. If the conflicts of interest between the principal and the agent are different on each dimension, then delegation is always strictly valuable. The principal can better extract information from the agent by using the spread between the two decisions as a costly screening device. Delegation sets no longer trade off pooling intervals and intervals of full discretion but instead take more complex shapes. We use advanced results from the calculus of variations to ensure existence of a solution and derive sufficient and necessary conditions for optimality. The optimal mechanism is continuous and deterministic. The agent?s informational rent, the average decision and its spread are strictly monotonic in the agent?s type. The comparison of the optimal mechanism with standard one-dimensional mechanisms shows how cooperation between different principals controlling various dimensions of the agent?s activities facilitates information revelation.     

马克思剩余价值理论的数理表达与创新

文章尝试从两个方面对马克思主义剩余价值理论进行探讨:一是依据马克思剩余价值基本理论抽理出这一理论的基本假定条件,并在这些假定条件下构建经典马克思剩余价值函数的基本模型,然后根据现代经济发展变化的现实,改变部分假定条件,尝试构建一个新约束条件下的剩余价值动态模型,这是现代马克思主义经济学创新的重要内容。二是探讨马克思主义剩余价值最大化生产模型与西方利润最大化的沟通与连接的问题,并通过数学推理证明两个模型在技术层面是完全可以相互沟通,这是现代马克思主义经济学繁荣发展的重要途径。     

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。     

Mechanism design with collusive supervision

We analyze an adverse selection environment with third party supervision. The supervisor is partly informed of the agent's type. The supervisor and the agent collude while interacting with the principal. Contracting with the agent directly and ignoring the presence of the supervisor constitutes the no-supervision benchmark. We show that delegating to the supervisor reduces the principal's payoff compared to the no-supervision benchmark under a standard condition on the distribution of the agent's types. In contrast, if the principal contracts with both the agent and the supervisor, there exists a mechanism that improves the principal's payoff over the no-supervision payoff.     

Teams, Firms and the Evolution of Profit Seeking Behavior

Even as advances in information theory over the last quarter century have cast increasing doubt on the proposition that firms successfully maximize profits, the objective of profit maximization continues to be an axiomatic feature of the neoclassical theory of the firm. This paper attempts to improve our understanding firms by treating the objective function as an open question. Specifically, an ontogenetic thought experiment is undertaken to address the question of what differentiates production teams from firms by asking why team members would sell their control rights to a principal, thereby transforming the team into a firm. What results is an account of the emergence of the objective of profit seeking. Profit seeking emerges endogenously as a more fit alternative than the objective of value maximization, which is less capable of coping with uncertainty through purposive adaptation.     

A Classroom Experiment Demonstrating the Generation of a Market Demand Function and the Determination of Equilibrium Price

Economics instructors continue to look for simple and effective means of motivating students while conveying important basic principles. Dennis Weidenaar describes a supply and demand simulation which can be used in any classroom to show how a market demand function is generated and how equilibrium price is determined. Involving little in the way of preparation, this activity simply calls for the sale of apples to students by the instructor, with individual and aggregate demand schedules being calculated. Such concepts as price and income elasticity, profit maximization, opportunity cost, market organization (monopoly, perfect competition and monopsony), consumer's and producer's surplus, and total, marginal and average revenue and cost can be illustrated through the use of the simulation and the suggested discussion questions.     

Profit maximization mitigates competition?

Summary. We consider oligopolistic markets in which the notion of shareholders’utility is well-defined and compare the Bertrand-Nash equilibria in case of utility maximization with those under the usual profit maximization hypothesis. Our main result states that profit maximization leads to less price competition than utility maximization. Since profit maximization tends to raise prices, it may be regarded as beneficial for the owners as a whole. Moreover, if profit maximization is a good proxy for utility maximization, then there is no need for a general equilibrium analysis that takes the distribution of profits among consumers fully into account and partial equilibrium analysis suffices.     

基于供应商道德风险的劳工标准移植研究*

越来越多的发展中国家企业通过劳工认证获取较多的市场份额,劳工标准移植的问题也受到较多关注。本文选择从供应商道德风险视角研究发展中国家的劳工标准移植的特征。研究发现,风险规避供应商的存在促使采购商必须在道德风险和努力水平之间选择一个次优均衡。尤其是考虑到最低标准等有限责任信息租的存在,使得采购商必须额外支付一定的代理成本以满足委托代理过程,最后的均衡劳工标准比仅考虑逆向选择更加扭曲。