Optimal risk sharing through renegotiation of simple contracts

We frequently observe that contracts do not include all of the contingencies that would seem to be necessary for optimal risk sharing between the parties to the contract. One reason may be that the possibility of renegotiation makes the contract more contingent than it appears. A simple contracting problem is used to show how even a simple contract may achieve optimal risk sharing if new information arrives slowly relatively to the speed of renegotiation.     

Negotiating the spirit of the deal

Most experienced negotiators are comfortable working out the terms of an economic contract--they bargain for the best price, haggle over equity splits, and finesse detailed exit clauses. Yet these same seasoned professionals spend so much time ironing out the letter of the deal that they often pay little attention to the spirit of the deal--the social contract. And that can lead to major problems, say the authors, because even though the parties agree to the same terms on paper, they may have very different expectations about how to meet them. Those on one side, for instance, might think they're entering into a long-term partnership, while those on the other believe they're simply making a series of discrete transactions. Because the parties have failed to have a true meeting of the minds, they sign a deal that is likely to fall apart. To avoid such a disastrous outcome, negotiators should explicitly discuss the details of their social contract before inking the deal. They should talk about the underlying social contract, which answers the question, What? For instance, what is the real nature, extent, and duration of the agreement? And they should discuss the ongoing social contract, which answers the question, How? For instance, in practice, how will we make decisions, handle unforeseen events, communicate with one another, and resolve disputes? Drawing on real-life examples, the authors explore the problems that arise when the letter and spirit of the deal are at odds and suggest ways to dovetail them so they are both independently strong and mutually reinforcing. They also highlight risk factors that can lead to misunderstandings and expose common misperceptions about the social contract.     

Costly contracting in a long‐term relationship

We examine a model of contracting where parties interact repeatedly and can contract at any point in time, but writing formal contracts is costly. A contract can describe the external environment and the parties' behavior in a more or less detailed way, and the cost of writing a contract is proportional to the amount of detail. We consider both formal (externally enforced) and informal (self‐enforcing) contracts. The presence of writing costs has important implications both for the optimal structure of formal contracts, particularly the tradeoff between contingent and spot contracting, and for the interaction between formal and informal contracting. Our model sheds light on these implications and generates a rich set of predictions about the determinants of the optimal mode of contracting.     

Contracting on litigation

Two risk‐averse litigants with different subjective beliefs negotiate in the shadow of a pending trial. Through contingent contracts, the litigants can mitigate risk and/or speculate on the trial outcome. Contingent contracting decreases the settlement rate and increases the volume and costs of litigation. These contingent contracts mimic the services provided by third‐party investors, including litigation funders and insurance companies. The litigants (weakly) prefer to contract with risk‐neutral third parties when the capital market is transaction‐cost free. However, contracting with third parties further decreases the settlement rate, increases the costs of litigation, and may increase the aggregate cost of risk bearing.     

Arbitrage-free pricing of multi-person game claims in discrete time

We introduce a class of financial contracts involving several parties by extending the notion of a two-person game option to a contract in which an arbitrary number of parties is involved and each of them is allowed to make a wide array of decisions at any time, not restricted to simply exercising the option. The collection of decisions by all parties then determines the contract’s termination date as well as the terminal payoff for each party. We provide sufficient conditions under which a discrete-time multi-person game option has a unique arbitrage-free price, which is additive with respect to any partition of the contract. Our results are illustrated by the detailed study of a particular multi-person contract with puttable tranches.     

The Recognition of Executory Contracts

This paper examines the nature of executory contracts using as examples forward exchange contracts, asset purchase commitments and leases. FECs are paid particular attention as they have not previously been the focus of discussions concerning executory contracts. The arguments in the literature for recognition of wholly executory contracts can be summarised as follows: recognition provides more relevant information for decision making and is therefore useful; and the contractual rights satisfy the control criterion required by most asset and liability definitions if the contract is firm, thereby evidencing the commitment of the parties. It is argued in this paper that the decision usefulness argument neglects representational faithfulness as it recognises rights that a party does not control; the rights under the contract can be separately identified as rights of alienation and use or conversion; and an approach using deprivai value provides a better indication of commitment than firmness.     

Mortgage Contracts,Strategic Options and Stochastic Collateral

This paper offers a game-theoretic model for both the analysis and valuation of mortgage contracts in the context of an economy with complete information and complete contingent claims markets. We analyze the equilibrium strategy of the lender, who holds an option over the magnitude of mortgage credit extended per dollar of collateral offered, and the mortgagor, who holds options to default or prepay, in a class of intertemporal mortgage contracts collateralized by property evolving according to a random process which is common knowledge to both parties to the mortgage contract. Using continuous–time arbitrage valuation principles, we derive the value of the mortgage contract to both parties and show, through both analytical solutions and numerical simulations, that Markov perfect equilibria exist in which, among other properties, a lower flow of housing services accruing to the borrower, per dollar of initial house value, and a correspondingly lower rate of effective depreciation, will elicit a larger volume of funds offered by a lender; the amount of credit offered, the values of the contract to both lender and mortgagor, and the expected losses to both parties from costly bankruptcy are highly sensitive to the perceived volatility of the value of the property collateralizing the mortgage, even in an economy with complete markets or risk neutrality on the parts of lender and borrower; the upper limit on mortgage credit offered by a rational lender may be a small fraction of the current fair market value of the property, regardless of the contractual yield offered by the borrower, and will decrease, at each such yield, as bankruptcy costs or housing service flows increase; and under significant but plausible values for bankruptcy and costs of liquidating property under foreclosure, the flow of mortgage credit can become negatively related to the spread of the mortgage yield over the riskless rate, with the lender preferring a lower contractual yield to a higher one.     

A Contingent Claims Analysis of Real Estate Listing Agreements

This article examines real estate brokerage contracts as contingent claims. It derives terminal and boundary conditions for this contract. A Nelson and Ramaswamy (1990) style lattice is then developed to solve the partial differential equation for the value of the listing agreement. After identifying various parameters that determine the contract's value, those parameters are varied to examine their relative impact on the contract.     

Contingent Commissions and the Management of the Independent Agency

Insurance agencies continue to exist as an important distribution mechanism because they give their contracting insurers advantages in risk selection and enable insurance applicants to transfer complex risks. While independent agencies are compensated by upfront commissions, a key component of their profitability is tied to contingent commissions. A contingency arrangement represents ex post compensation normally tied to underwriting profitability, volume, and annual growth. We report two actual contingency contracts in the context of a decision process for choosing among contingency offerings by insurers. We incorporate both uncertainty and correlation among key variables to arrive at values for competing contracts, then use a downside risk approach that helps agency owners select the better contract. The approach offered in this article is scalable to a selection problem for any number of contingency arrangements.     

论投保人缴纳保费或保险公司签发保单附条件条款的法律效力

我国保险实践中普遍将投保人缴纳保费或者保险公司签发保单作为保险合同的成立、生效或者保险责任开始的条件。但该条件不是新《保险法》规定的附条件保险合同所指的条件。同时该附条件条款赋予了保险公司对要约进行承诺时或者履行合同义务时不受时间限制的权利,该附条件条款因不具有合理性应为无效合同条款。     

Stochastic contracts and subjective evaluations

Subjective evaluations are widely used, but call for different contracts from classical moral-hazard settings. Previous literature shows that contracts require payments to third parties. I show that the (implicit) assumption of deterministic contracts makes payments to third parties necessary. This article studies incentive contracts with stochastic compensation, like payments in stock options or uncertain arbitration procedures. These contracts incentivize employees without the need for payments to third parties. In addition, stochastic contracts can be more efficient and can make the principal better off compared to deterministic contracts. My results also address the puzzle about the prevalence of labor contracts with stochastic compensation.     

The Effects of State Risk and Controllability Filters on Compensation Contract and Effort Choice

Surveys of business firms in the U.S.A. indicate that standard-based compensation contracts are common in practice. Analytical studies of this form of contract have suggested that under conditions of state risk, an employee's contract and effort choice are significantly affected by how pay relates to measured performance, and whether the compensation contract filters out the effects on measured performance of factors beyond the employee's control. This paper reports the results of a laboratory experiment indicating that in the presence of state risk, an individual's choice of compensation contract depends jointly on these two contract attributes and his/her risk preference as well as performance capability. The findings also indicate that actual effort is a function of the realized state, the presence/absence of a controllability filter, and the level at which the individual had expected to perform at the time of his/her contract selection. When an adverse state was realized, subjects without a controllability filter still exerted the level of effort that they had expected at contract selection, even though their marginal return to effort had been substantially reduced. On the other hand, when the controllability filter was absent, subjects who had a favourable realized state increased their effort in response to the increased marginal return to effort.     

The economics of earnings manipulation and managerial compensation

This article examines managerial compensation in an environment where managers may take a hidden action that affects the actual earnings of the firm. When realized, these earnings constitute hidden information that is privately observed by the manager, who may expend resources to generate an inflated earnings report. We characterize the optimal managerial compensation contract in this setting, and demonstrate that contracts contingent on reported earnings cannot provide managers with the incentive both to maximize profits and to report those profits honestly. As a result, some degree of earnings management must be tolerated as a necessary part of an efficient agreement.     

Contracting in the shadow of the law

Economic models of contract typically assume that courts enforce obligations based on verifiable events (corresponding to the legal rule of specific performance). As a matter of law, this is not the case. This leaves open the question of optimal contract design given the available remedies used by the courts. This article shows that American standard form construction contracts can be viewed as an efficient mechanism for implementing building projects given existing legal rules. It is shown that a central feature of these contracts is the inclusion of governance covenants that shape the scope of authority and regulate the ex post bargaining power of parties. Our model also implies that the legal remedies of mistake, impossibility and the doctrine limiting damages for unforeseen events developed in the case of Hadley v. Baxendale are efficient solutions to the problem of implementing complex exchange.     

高管激励及其制度挤出

基于经济人自利偏好的激励契约会对公司高管的内在激励产生挤出效应。激励契约的挤出效应根本上是源于委托人面对未来或然事件带给当事人效用的影响没有把握,由此释放出的不信任信号刺激了代理人对等的不信任,从而形成制度挤出。根据信任博弈模型分析发现,在经济组织中利益相关方主动构建在个人关系、制度上的相互信任关系,并形成信任、互惠公平的制度环境,是高管激励契约有效实施的基础。     

Insurance Contract Design When the Insurer Has Private Information on Loss Size

This article examines the optimal indemnity contract in an insurance market, when the insurer has private information about the size of an insurable loss. Both parties know whether or not a loss occurred, but only the insurer knows the true value of the loss and/or to what extent the losses are covered under the policy. The insured may verify the insurer's loss estimate for a fixed auditing cost. The optimal contract reimburses the auditing costs in addition to full insurance for losses less than some endogenous limit. For losses exceeding this limit, the contract pays a fixed indemnity and requires no monitoring. The optimal contract is compared with the contracts obtained in cases where it is only the insured who can observe the loss size.
     

Stochastic Convenience Yield and the Pricing of Oil Contingent Claims

This paper develops and empirically tests a two-factor model for pricing financial and real assets contingent on the price of oil. The factors are the spot price of oil and the instantaneous convenience yield. The parameters of the model are estimated using weekly oil futures contract prices from January 1984 to November 1988, and the model's performance is assessed out of sample by valuing futures contracts over the period November 1988 to May 1989. Finally, the model is applied to determine the present values of one barrel of oil deliverable in one to ten years time.     

Hedging Equity-Linked Life Insurance Contracts

Abstract

This paper examines a portfolio of equity-linked life insurance contracts and determines risk-minimizing hedging strategies within a discrete-time setup. As a principal example, I consider the Cox-Ross-Rubinstein model and an equity-linked pure endowment contract under which the policyholder receives max(S_T , K) at time T if he or she is then alive, where S_T is the value of a stock index at the term T of the contract and K is a guarantee stipulated by the contract. In contrast to most of the existing literature, I view the contracts as contingent claims in an incomplete model and discuss the problem of choosing an optimality criterion for hedging strategies. The subsequent analysis leads to a comparison of the risk (measured by the variance of the insurer’s loss) inherent in equity-linked contracts in the two situations where the insurer applies the risk-minimizing strategy and the insurer does not hedge. The paper includes numerical results that can be used to quantify the effect of hedging and describe how this effect varies with the size of the insurance portfolio and assumptions concerning the mortality.     

Liars Never Prosper? How Management Misrepresentation Reduces Monitoring Costs

When monitoring is not contractible—so investors monitor only when, at that time, they expect to benefit from doing so—efficient contracts sometimes induce managers to makefalsereports to investors. Because of monitoring discretion, management misrepresentation can produce Pareto improvements by reducing monitoring costs. When costs of renegotiation are small, optimal contracts necessarily induce misrepresentation. Discretionary monitoring also generates an equilibrium role for multiple-security capital structures. When an optimal contract has two investors, securityholder conflict arises endogenously as a means of reducing monitoring costs. It is efficient to write the contract so that one investor's decision to monitor hurts the other investor.Journal of Economic LiteratureClassification Number: G32.     

Accelerated share repurchase and other buyback programs: what neural networks can bring

When firms want to buy back their own shares, they have a choice between several alternatives. If they often carry out open market repurchase, they also increasingly rely on banks through complex buyback contracts involving option components, e.g. accelerated share repurchase contracts, VWAP-minus profit-sharing contracts, etc. The entanglement between the execution problem and the option hedging problem makes the management of these contracts a difficult task that should not boil down to simple Greek-based risk hedging, contrary to what happens with classical books of options. In this paper, we propose a machine learning method to optimally manage several types of buyback contract. In particular, we recover strategies similar to those obtained in the literature with partial differential equation and recombinant tree methods and show that our new method, which does not suffer from the curse of dimensionality, enables to address types of contract that could not be addressed with grid or tree methods.