Policy Bias Equivalence under Common Agency

This paper studies interest group influence on policy making. Lobbying occurs in a first price auction where an interest group wins with certainty, if her bid exceeds the loser’s bid by the policy maker’s valuation for the socially best policy. Otherwise the latter implements the privately known best policy. In equilibrium the size of the policy maker’s valuation does not matter for the size of the policy bias. The idea is to construct a “reference game” and to shift the support of the equilibrium mixed strategies into the original game, without altering the structure of the densities.     

Relational Political Contribution under Common Agency

Motivated by commitment problems of contracts in lobbying, this paper studies a model of a repeated common agency where monetary transfers must be voluntary. First, we show that the optimal punishment strategy for a principal takes a two‐phase scheme, which is similar to the punishment characterized by Goldlücke and Kranz. Second, we investigate whether an outcome of standard menu auctions with binding contracts can be supported by implicit contracts. We define the environment to be more preference‐diverse if an efficient decision is less attractive to each principal. We show that the discount factor must be high to support the outcome of the standard menu auction if the environment is preference‐diversified.     

Common and Exclusive Agencies and Partial Delegation

Within the context of common agency, the article examines separationand partial delegation. The first entails breaking the multiple-taskagency into smaller single-task agencies, whereas the secondallows principals to substitute some of their efforts for theagency's. With respect to the first alternative, it is shownthat common agency can be sustained against separation by thepresence of strong complements. For the second alternative,principals partially delegate their effort and retain the rightto influence agency output at a later stage of the game. Althoughthis tends to weaken agency incentives, principals may preferthis version of common agency than one under full delegationand may prefer it to an exclusive one.     

Efficient Private Production of Public Goods under Common Agency

A private, profit-maximizing firm produces a public good that enters the utility functions of several users. Each of them separately designs and proposes to the firm a contract specifying a transfer payment as a function of the amount of public good supplied. The firm has to accept or to refuse each contract before knowing the realized value of a random variable that enters its cost function. We study the Nash equilibria of this game and explore some refinements ruling out Pareto inefficient equilibria.Journal of Economic LiteratureClassification Numbers: C72, H41.     

Is it Harmful to Allow Partial Cooperation?

In economics, politics and society, examples abound in economics, politics and society where agents can enter partial cooperation schemes, i.e., they can collude with a subset of agents. Several contributions devoted to specific settings have claimed that such partial cooperation actually worsens welfare compared to the no-cooperation situation. Our paper assesses this view by highlighting the forces that lead to such results. We find that the nature of strategic spillovers is central to determining whether partial cooperation is bad. Our propositions are then applied to various examples as industry wage bargaining or local public goods.
JEL classification: C 72; E 62; J 5     

The Political Economy of IMF Conditionality: A Common Agency Model

The paper models the relationship between an aid‐providing international financial institution (IFI) and an aid‐receiving government whose economic policy choices are influenced by a domestic interest group. Two assistance schemes are evaluated: conditional aid in which the IFI makes assistance contingent on less‐ distorting economic policies and unconditional aid which is provided without such conditions. Conditional aid is shown to raise welfare of the receiving country and the world as a whole relative to unconditional aid. The paper also examines how conditional and unconditional aid schemes are influenced by the IFI's opportunity cost of providing assistance and the receiving government's political dependence on a domestic interest group.     

Sovereign Debt Capacity and the Distribution of Domestic Wealth: A Common Agency Model*

This paper proposes a stylized two‐period, two‐country model illustrating the role of distribution of domestic wealth in determining a country's level of access to international lending. We model sovereign debt redemption policy in a common agency framework. Within this framework, policy is the outcome of the interaction between government and local and foreign interest groups with conflicting preferences on debt repayment. Our main result is that in full lobby competition, when all interests are represented, the only equilibrium solution is repudiation and the consequent inability of government to access international capital markets. Conversely, when the ability to lobby depends on wealth, governments can access international credit up to a given maximum external debt capacity, determined by the skew in the distribution of domestic wealth.     

产权、代理成本和代理效率

本文选择政府管制较少、竞争较为充分的电子电器行业作为研究对象,考察了产权制度与代理成本和代理效率的关系,得到以下结论:(1)在代理成本上,国有产权企业普遍高于混和产权企业,混和产权企业高于个人产权企业;在代理成本差异上,混和产权企业与个人产权企业的差异小于与国有产权企业的差异。(2)长期投资率和职工人数与代理成本呈显著正相关关系,而长期投资率、财务杠杆比率、职工人数等与代理效率呈显著负相关关系。(3)企业规模越大,不同产权的代理成本差异越小;反之代理成本差异越大。(4)随着市场竞争程度的提高,各类产权企业的代理成本都呈现下降趋势,其代理效率呈现提高趋势。我们研究的启示是国有企业改革的突破口应考虑如何降低其代理成本,解决的措施之一是产权改革,尤其是产权多元化的改革,其次是完善对投资和负债及冗员的监督和控制机制,以促进代理成本的降低和代理效率的提高。     

股权激励与代理成本

传统以管理费用率作为代理成本的替代不能恰当地反映管理者在职消费和职务侵占的真实水平,本文用经过Jones模型纠正的费用率作为代理成本的替代,考察了所有权性质、总经理持股与否及持股比例对代理成本的影响。本文提供了私有制下总经理适当持股有利于降低代理成本的可靠证据,为中国上市公司即将展开的股权激励计划提供证据的支持。     

Agency costs and business cycles

Summary. This paper develops a model with endogenous agency costs that is otherwise quite similar to the canonical real business cycle model. The traditional assumption in the literature is that these agency costs arise in the production of investment goods. In contrast, this paper assumes that these costs are all encompassing in the sense that they arise in the production of aggregate output. The paper explores both the importance of the investment vs. output assumption for business cycle dynamics, and the conditions under which these agency models can deliver amplification and/or persistence. The paper has two principal conclusions. First, in terms of amplification and propagation, the output model performs worse than does the investment model. This arises because a variable distortion in the investment market has more of an impact than a comparable distortion in the output market. Second, in this model with optimal consumption choice by entrepreneurs, there is a clear tension between amplification and persistence. Received: December 30, 1997; revised version: April 1, 1998     

Endogenous Verifiability and Optimality in Agency

This paper investigates the optimal contract design in a principal-agent model where verification of an agent's action is endogenously determined through strategic interactions between contracting parties. We derive a necessary and sufficient condition for the first best outcome to be implemented as an equilibrium. The equilibrium has the following features: (i) The action level that the agent chooses is not verified even if it is possible. (ii) Nevertheless, the first best can be attained by making a contract contingent on the unverified action. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: D20, K40.     

Incentives and Standards in Agency Contracts

This paper studies the structure of state‐contingent contracts in the presence of moral hazard and multitasking. Necessary and sufficient conditions for the presence of multitasking to lead to fixed payments instead of incentive schemes are identified. It is shown that the primary determinant of whether multitasking leads to higher or lower powered incentives is the role that noncontractible outputs play in helping the agent deal with the production risk associated with the observable and contractible outputs. When the noncontractible outputs are risk substitutes and are socially undesirable, standards are never optimal. If the noncontractible outputs are socially desirable, standards are never optimal if the noncontractible outputs play a risk‐complementary role.     

国外家族企业代理理论研究新进展

基于私有产权、两权合一和家族管理特征的考虑,传统代理理论把家族企业视为治理信任和降低代理成本的高效率制度安排。然而,越来越多的研究发现,当父母对子女的不对称的利他主义与私人所有权、所有者管理等特征相互交织时,家族企业凸现自我控制问题,这削弱了正式治理机制的效率。因此,家族企业同样面临逆向选择、道德风险和要挟等代理问题。嵌入在血缘和利他主义中的家族和企业两大系统的相互作用,使家族企业的代理问题更加复杂化,也给家族企业治理提出了难题。     

启蒙的主体

启蒙既不是一个凌驾于所有人之上的理性的纯粹运动,也不是人类的一个群体对另一个群体,一个族类对另一个族类,一个人对另一个人的教化。每一个个体作为自为者都是启蒙的主体;与此同时,每个主体对于任何另外一个主体都可以是,或者应当是一个批判性的主体。