The efficiency of bonus-or-terminate incentive schemes under subjective evaluations

We study a repeated principal–agent model with subjective evaluations. We construct simple bonus-or-terminate incentive schemes. In these schemes, the principal evaluates the agent every T periods. The principal pays a bonus and asks the agent to work for T more periods if the evaluation is positive. The relationship is terminated if the evaluation is negative. The inefficiencies in these schemes vanish as the agent can be more frequently evaluated. This result holds generally under objective or subjective evaluations.     

What do information frictions do?

Summary. We present an overlapping generations model in which a labor market friction (moral hazard) coexists and interacts with a credit market friction (costly state verification). Our main results are: (i) while credit market frictions have long- and short-run real effects, labor market frictions typically have only short-run effects unless they also affect the volume of investment per worker, (ii) the frictions amplify each other to produce higher long-run unemployment than would result from only labor market frictions, (iii) these distortions may prolong the effect of temporary shocks, and (iv) the dynamics of economies with both frictions are qualitatively similar to their frictionless counterparts.Received: 25 February 2003, Revised: 1 April 2004, JEL Classification Numbers: E13, E24, O41, O17. Correspondence to: Joydeep BhattacharyaWork on this paper began while Bhattacharya was visiting the University of Texas at Austin and was completed when Chakraborty was visiting the IMF Institute in Washington, DC. We are grateful to both institutions for their hospitality. For helpful comments and suggestions we thank Valerie Bencivenga, Dean Corbae, Scott Freeman, Rajesh Singh, participants at the Macro Tea in Austin, and especially, an anonymous referee of this journal. The usual caveat applies.     

Publications and papers

America’s elementary and secondary educational system is faced with an inefficiency stemming from a basic problem associated with unobservability: moral hazard. In this case, the teacher (agent) has an incentive to exert less effort (given cost associated with more work) if the school district (principal) cannot distinguish between low student performance due to a lack of teacher effort and low student performance due low student quality (random variable). This research develops an optimal incentive scheme that guarantees the teacher a fixed payment, plus a variable payment that would be a function of teacher ‘action’ variables thereby reducing moral hazard.     

Performance Standards and Incentive Pay in Agency Contracts

When the presence of limited liability restricts a principal from imposing monetary fines on an agent in case of poor performance, the principal might use other kinds of punishment threats to deter the agent from shirking. We show that under the optimal contract in this case, the principal sets a performance standard and punishes the agent if the standard is not met, but rewards the agent on a profit-sharing basis if the standard is significantly exceeded. The optimal choice of performance standards for such contracts is discussed. It is shown that punishment threats, although inefficient, often help the principal to discipline the agent.
JEL classification : D 82     

Contests to become CEO: incentives, selection and handicaps

Should a firm favor insiders (handicap outsiders) when selecting a CEO? One reason to do so is to take advantage of the contest to become CEO as a device for providing current incentives to employees. An important reason not to do so is that this can reduce the ability of future CEOs and, hence, future profits. The trade-off between providing current incentives and selecting the most able individual to become CEO is the focus of this paper. If insiders are good enough (better or nearly as good as outsiders), incentive provision to insiders typically dominates and it is optimal to handicap outsiders, sometimes so severely that they have no chance to win the contest. However, if outsiders are sufficiently better than insiders, selection dominates and it is the insiders who are severely handicapped. This finding is in sharp contrast to the existing literature which has so far ignored this trade-off. In all, our model provides useful insight into contests to become CEO and rationalizes empirical regularities in the source of CEOs chosen by firms. In particular, our analysis helps to explain the lower tendency of firms in more heterogeneous industries and firms with a product or line of business organizational structure to select an outsider as CEO.     

Conflicting tasks and moral hazard: Theory and experimental evidence

We study a multi-task principal-agent problem in which tasks can be in direct conflict with each other. In theory, it is difficult to induce a single agent to exert efforts in two conflicting tasks, because effort in one task decreases the success probability of the other task. We have conducted an experiment in which we find strong support for the relevance of this incentive problem. In the presence of conflict, subjects choose two efforts significantly less often when both tasks are assigned to a single agent than when there are two agents each in charge of one task.     

Risk allocation and uncertainty: some unpleasant outcomes of financial innovation

Financial innovation introduces the possibility of exchange on wider time-events sets. In this way, market incompleteness should be reduced with an overall advantage. The existence of this advantage also depends on other elements, like the degree of market competition, the level of information, and the presence of inefficiencies generated by moral hazard. One kind of behavior which has been widely common among banks consists in the reduction of risk taking in relation to credit activity. Credit risk tends to be covered through the packaging of credits into securities. This situation means that since the bank is not shouldering the risk, it does not invest in the acquisition of knowledge regarding the borrower, but only regarding his/her generic characteristics which are reflected in the evaluation of the assets in which the credits are packaged. Moreover, financial innovation was developed, in particular by investment banks, with non-standardized products, exchanged over-the-counter, and substantially lacking secondary markets. The greatest problems derive from the low liquidity of these products and from the uncertainty over their returns. This is why it would be good to stimulate the introduction of standardized products, whose risks are easy to determine, to be exchanged on organized markets, instead of complex products, which are substantially illiquid and exchanged over-the-counter.

Team production with inequity-averse agents

This paper analyzes the efficiency of team production when risk-neutral agents exhibit other-regarding preferences. It is shown that full efficiency can be sustained as an equilibrium of a budget-balancing mechanism that punishes some randomly chosen agents if output falls short of the efficient level but distributes output equally otherwise. The result depends on agents being sufficiently inequity-averse.

Linear contracts as incentives: a puzzle

This paper reexamines the linear schedule of compensation as a tool for providing incentives to managers when contractible output is a function of costly effort and a random shock. Two puzzling situations compatible with linear schemes of compensation are presented. First, if the model parameters are such that the optimal participation on output is below 50%, the variable compensation turns out to have a negative effect on manager’s utility. Second, if it is below 25%, linear incentives allow situations in which larger utilities are reached by means of smaller rewards.      

Agency theory: choice-based foundations of the parametrized distribution formulation

This paper develops choice-theoretic foundations of the principal’s and the agent’s behaviors underlying the parametrized distribution formulation of agency theory. Both the principal and the agent are expected-utility maximizers and their action-dependent subjective probabilities are defined directly on the outcomes. The results are used to evaluate and interpret the common prior assumption. I am grateful to Simon Grant and, in particular, to Peter Wakker for their comments and suggestions, and to the NSF for financial support under grant SES-0314249.     

Consumption and disposable income in the EU countries: the role of wealth effects

We investigate the long run relationship between private consumption and disposable income for a sample of EU countries using recently developed panel cointegration techniques. For the ordinary consumption-income model the evidence on cointegration is ambiguous. In addition, the cointegration vector obtained by efficient estimation methods is not consistent with theoretical reasoning, as it reflects a decline in the savings rate over time. Extending the analysis by financial wealth improves the model fit markedly. In particular, the income elasticity is not different from 1 and therefore in line with the life cycle permanent income hypothesis. The marginal propensity to consume out of financial wealth is in a range of 3–5%, thereby confirming recent time series results.     

Occupational self-selection in a labor market with moral hazard

This paper studies the determinants and implications of self-selection when firms imperfectly observe worker effort. The effects of the resulting moral hazard problem on the self-selection mechanism are analyzed in a model in which workers simultaneously choose an employment sector and an effort level. The implications of the model reveal that in the presence of moral hazard, workers’ effort decisions become an additional mechanism determining the pattern of selection into sectors. Workers’ sector-specific endowments impact sectoral allocation through their effect on workers’ comparative advantage as well as their effect on workers’ shirking propensity. The model is then used in an empirical application that analyzes workers’ self-selection into white collar and blue collar occupations. The estimation results, based on data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, suggest that workers’ occupational self-selection leads to higher wages and lower dismissal rates in both occupations, compared to an economy in which workers are randomly assigned to each occupation. The difference in dismissal rates between the two occupations is driven by the higher expected productivity in the white collar sector. The positive effects of occupational sorting diminish as the labor market becomes increasingly characterized by moral hazard. Results also suggest that human capital investments in skills that are most relevant to blue collar jobs may generate higher wages and lower dismissal rates in both white collar and blue collar occupations.     

Tax efficiency in selected Indian states

This paper attempts to measure pure tax efficiency of fifteen major Indian states (Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Bihar, Haryana, Gujarat, Karnataka, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Orissa, Punjab, Rajasthan, Tamilnadu, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal) for the period 1980–81 to 1992–93 in a manner that allows this efficiency to vary both across time as well as across states. It is discovered that there is a moral hazard problem in the design of central grants in that higher grants by the central government to the state governments reduce efficiency of tax collection by these states. The less poor states are more efficient in tax collection. The rankings of states by tax efficiency for the various years do not converge. An index of aggregate tax efficiency is calculated and it appears that this index has been stagnating. It is argued that the weight placed on tax effort in the formula determining central grants to state governments should be increased to improve tax efficiency of state governments. First version received: November 1997/final version received: November 1998     

Ranking of information systems in agency models: an integral condition

Summary. We provide a condition for ranking of information systems in agency problems. The condition has a straightforward economic interpretation in terms of the sensitivity of a cumulative distribution with respect to the agent's effort. The criterion is shown to be equivalent to the mean preserving spread condition on the likelihood ratio distributions. Received: November 10, 1999; revised version: February 17, 2000