线性合同招标中投标人数的博弈模型研究

在线性合同的假设前提下，论文通过建立模型，求解博弈的贝叶斯均衡得到了风险中性的理性招标人的最优合同形式以及投标人的最优报价策略。最后，论文通过引入招标成本函数，进一步提出了对于招标人控制投标人数从而达到自身目标最优的策略。     

Stochastic costly state verification and dynamic contracts

I consider a dynamic costly state verification environment in which a risk-averse agent enters into a contract with a risk-neutral principal. The agent has random income which is unknown to the principal but can be verified at a cost. The principal can commit to executing random verifications.I extend the standard recursive methods to study the problem and show that it is optimal to set verification probabilities strictly less than 1. If the agent׳s absolute risk aversion declines sufficiently slowly, the principal will use verification regardless of its cost. If the agent's income is verified then he would get consumption and continuation utility strictly higher than if his income were not verified.     

A study on the incentive compensation structure with payroll tax: A continuous-time principal-agent model

This paper studies a case when the government levies a payroll tax on the employee (agent) of an enterprise. We use a continuous-time principal-agent framework to analyze the impact of the tax on the employee’s working strategy and derive an incentive compensation scheme. The agent is supposed to be aware of his pre-tax and after-tax salary. Under the theory of behavioral economics, loss caused by taxation is taken into consideration. The Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equation of principal’s profits is derived. By exploiting the HJB equation, we get several properties of the optimal contract. We also perform comparative statics to show our results. The model suggests that the agent’s utility loss enlarges as the tax rate increases. However, an increase in the tax rate does not always decrease principal’s profits.     

Optimal deterministic contracting mechanisms for principal-agent problems with moral hazard and adverse selection

For the principal-agent problem with moral hazard and adverse selection we establish that within the collection of all measurable, deterministic contracting mechanisms satisfying the individual rationality and incentive compatibility constraints there exists one that is optimal for a risk averse principal contracting with a risk averse agent. In addition to demonstrating existence, one of the main contributions of the paper is to show that, in general, centralized contracting implemented via a contracting mechanism is equivalent to delegated contracting implemented via a contract menu. Thus, contracting can always be delegated to the agent without gain or loss to the principal. Based on this result, the existence of an optimal contracting mechanism for the principal-agent problem is established by showing that there exists an optimal contract menu for the equivalent delegated contracting problem. Received: 7 October 1994 / Accepted: 14 January 1997     

Team Incentives and Reference‐Dependent Preferences

We investigate a multi‐agent moral‐hazard model where agents have expectation‐based reference‐dependent preferences à la K?szegi and Rabin (2006, 2007). We show that even when each agent's probability of success in a project is independent, a principal may employ team incentives. Because the agents are loss averse, they have first‐order risk aversion to wage uncertainty. This causes the agents to work harder when their own failure is stochastically compensated through other agents' performance. In the optimal contract, agents with high performance are always rewarded, whereas agents with low performance are rewarded if and only if other agents' performance is high.     

Feedback in Tournaments under Commitment Problems: Experimental Evidence

We theoretically as well as experimentally analyze tournaments in which one of the agents leads over the other before entering the tournament, that is, in which one of the competitors benefits from a head start. The principal may decide upon informing the agents about the degree of this asymmetry. She cannot commit to giving feedback ex ante or not and, thus, chooses the strategy that is optimal for her ex post. In equilibrium, the principal reveals information if the asymmetry is not too large. Our experimental findings qualitatively confirm our theoretical prediction. Moreover, behavior of the principal and the agents is well aligned to each other.     

Locally robust contracts for moral hazard

We consider a moral hazard problem in which the principal has a slight uncertainty about how the agent’s actions translate into output. An incentive contract can be made robust against an $ϵ$ amount of uncertainty, at the cost of a loss to the principal on the order of $\sqrt{ϵ}$, by refunding a small fraction of profit to the agent. We show that as $ϵ$ goes to zero, this construction is essentially optimal, in the sense of minimizing the worst-case loss, among all modifications to the contract that do not depend on the details of the environment.     

Risky allocations from a risk-neutral informed principal

We study a model of informed principal with private values where the principal is risk neutral and the agent is risk averse. We show that the principal, regardless of her type, gains by not revealing her type to the agent through the contract offer. The equilibrium allocation transfers some ex-ante risk from one type of agent to the other. Despite the increase in the principal's surplus, allocative efficiency does not necessarily improve. Received: 26 January 2004, Accepted: 5 May 2005 JEL Classification: C72, D23, D82 I would like to thank my supervisor Leonardo Felli for suggestions and Leo Ferraris for helpful discussions. All remainig errors are my own.     

Targets and Resources: A Screening Perspective

To secure funding for a project, an agent (informed about the project's type) announces a target output. The principal provides more generous resources for high targets but makes compensation tied to performance relative to the projection. The incentive mechanism is geared towards screening project/agent types for resource disbursement at the ex‐ante stage and motivating appropriate efforts at the interim stage. These dual objectives are embedded in an optimal share contract solution: a pair of startup funds and output share between the principal and agent. The target mechanism's performance is then assessed with respect to implementation of the optimal share contract solution. The focus is on linear contracts for their applicability and practical relevance. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Information Acquisition and the Equilibrium Incentive Problem

I study the optimal incentive provision in a principal–agent relationship with costly information acquisition by the agent. I emphasize that adverse selection or moral hazard is the principal's endogenous choice by inducing or deterring information acquisition. The principal designs the contract not only to address an existing incentive problem but also to implement its presence. Implementation of adverse selection relies on a steeper information rent to the agent than the standard menu, such that the agent is motivated to distinguish the efficient state of nature from the inefficient. Moral hazard is implemented by replacing the benchmark debt contract with a debt‐with‐equity‐share contract, such that the agent does not attempt to acquire information to either avoid debt or to extract rent.     

Are generalized call-spreads efficient?

In order to explain coexistence of a deductible for low values of the loss and an upper limit for high values of the loss in insurance contracts, we consider the exchange of risk between two rank dependent expected utility maximizers. It is shown that if the insurer (insured) takes more into account the lowest outcomes – hence maximal losses – than the insured (insurer), then the optimal contract has an upper limit (includes a deductible for high values of the loss). If furthermore, the insured (insurer) neglects the highest outcomes while the insurer (insured) does not, the optimal contract includes a deductible (full insurance) for low values of the loss.     

Dynamic incentive contracts with termination threats

We consider a dynamic moral hazard model where the principal offers a series of short-run contracts. We study the optimal mix of two alternative instruments for incentive provision: a performance based wage (a “carrot”) and a termination threat (a “stick”). At any given point in time, these instruments are substitutes in the provision of incentives. We are particularly interested in the dynamic interaction of these two instruments. Both carrot and stick are used more intensively as the agent approaches the end of his finite life. The sharing of the surplus of the relationship plays a key role: a termination threat is included in the optimal contract if and only if the agent’s expected future gain from the relationship is sufficiently high, compared to the principal’s expected future gain. Also, a termination threat is more likely to be optimal if output depends more on “luck” than on effort, if the discount factor is high, or if the agent’s productivity is low. The model, provided that the optimal contract includes a termination threat, essentially provides an alternative explanation for upward-sloping wage profiles even in the absence of full-commitment.     

On the Performance of Linear Contracts

We examine the ability of linear contracts to replicate the performance of optimal unrestricted contracts in the canonical moral hazard setting with a wealth constrained, risk averse agent. We find that in a broad class of environments, the principal can always secure with a linear contract at least 95% of the profit that she secures with an optimal unrestricted contract, provided the productivity of the agent's effort is not too meager.     

Optimal Contracts for Long-Term Decisions and the Threat of Dismissal

This paper studies a simple agency model where an agent's decision can affect his or her own future payoffs as well as the principal's. The threat of dismissal becomes an important part of an incentive scheme even if the principal can use the performance-based wage contract. However, if the agent's future payoffs depend on the past realized performance, but not on the past decision directly, or if the agent is risk-neutral, it is not optimal to use the threat of dismissal. As the agent's discretion over his future payoffs increases, the principal relies more on the threat of dismissal but less on the wage contract.     

Securitization and optimal retention under moral hazard

Securitization improves liquidity in capital markets by allowing originators to remove issued loans from its balance sheet and use the proceeds for other purposes. Securitization is often suspected of being one of the main reasons for the recent financial crisis. One concern is that securitization leads to moral hazard in lender screening and monitoring. By selling loans to investors and removing them from their books, banks have a lesser incentive to carefully evaluate and monitor borrowers’ credit quality to ensure that they can repay their loans. One problem in the literature is that the analysis of securitization is very general and suffers from a lack of specific security design analysis under asymmetric information. We address the moral hazard problem using a principal–agent model where the investor is the principal and the lender is the agent. We show that the optimal contract must contain a retention clause in the presence of moral hazard. The optimal retention is affected by tranching and credit enhancement.     

Remedying Illegal Actions of Judgment Proof Injurers Via Contracts,Fines and Sanctions

This paper studies the impact of the judgment proof problem on the design of incentives to prevent illegal behavior when the principal delegates a risky production activity to the agent in the presence of moral hazard and adverse selection. The agent can reduce costs by engaging in an illegal action that generates liability. When insolvency is endogenously determined, the principal neither provides incentives to the agent to induce a fully legal action nor designs a contract that makes either party insolvent. The social optimum can be achieved by a fine or non‐monetary sanction. If the fine cannot correct inefficiency, non‐monetary sanction achieves the social optimum by the fully legal action. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Optimal corporate hedging using options with basis and production risk

We investigate the optimal hedging strategy for a firm using options, where the role of production and basis risk are considered. Contrary to the existing literature, we find that the exercise price which minimizes the shortfall of the hedged portfolio is primarily affected by the amount of cash spent on the hedging. Also, we decompose the effect of production and basis risk showing that the former affects hedging effectiveness while the latter drives the choice of the optimal contract. Fitting the model parameters to match a financial turmoil scenario confirms that suboptimal option moneyness leads to a non-negligible economic loss.     

On contracting for uncertain R&D

Using a two‐stage model, this paper studies auctions of research and development (R&D) contracts when the outcome of research is uncertain. The agent is contracted by the principal to invent a new product or a new process. The principal selects the most capable agent through an auction and writes an incentive contract with the winning agent to share risks. The main finding of the paper is that the generally superior incentive contracts might not be desirable under plausible conditions in R&D contracting. In particular, we find that the principal prefers a cost‐plus contract in cases of large R&D projects or rising innovation benefits, but would prefer a fixed‐price contract when the number of bidders increases. An alternate elasticity interpretation of results holds promise for empirical analysis. Public policy implications are finally discussed. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Dynamic agency with persistent observable shocks

This paper studies a continuous-time hidden-action model with persistent observable shocks. In this model, I develop a method to characterize the optimal contract with history-dependent effort exertion and shirking decisions. Temporal shirking is always optimal after some histories as long as a positive persistent shock is expected. As a result, my model gives rise to a mechanism through which the moral hazard problem amplifies macroeconomic fluctuations. I also show the pattern of the agent’s utility adjustments with respect to persistent shocks and its implications for compensation design.     

Optimal effort in the principal-agent problem with time-inconsistent preferences

This paper incorporates an agent’s time-inconsistent preferences into the Sannikov (2008) contract model to explore the effects of an agent’s preferences on his own behaviors: the incentive effort choice, the optimal retirement time and the consumption flow during his whole career life. We find the agent’s time inconsistency makes it difficult for him to be motivated and makes him need more compensation. An agent’s time-inconsistency erodes both the principal and his own income. The time-inconsistent agent will choose a lower incentive effort level, retire at an earlier time and have a lower consumption flow compared with his time-consistent peer. The time-inconsistent preference exactly influences the agents behavior and makes the agency problem more serious. Therefore, the firm has to cost more to stimulate such a time-inconsistent agent, which will damage the firms profits, as well as the efficiency.