Moral hazard and incentives in a decentralized planning environment

The relationship between the center and the socialist manager in a decentralized planning environment is modeled in this article as one between principal and agent. A class of incentive contracts is examined in which, besides a sharing rule, the center stipulates an outcome target the manager must achieve; otherwise he will be paid a fixed payment. It is shown that the optimal incentive target is the lower bound of all feasible targets, while the optimal sharing rule is strictly locally convex at the optimal target.