Download or read book Essays on Contract Design and Incentive Provision written by Eva I. Hoppe-Fischer and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-02-19 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contract theory, which emphasizes the importance of unverifiable actions and private information, has been a highly active field of research in microeconomics in the last decades. This thesis is divided into two parts. Part I consists of three chapters that study contract-theoretic models which are motivated by the classic procurement problem of a principal who wants an agent to deliver a certain good or service. In such models it is typically assumed that decision makers are interested in their own monetary payoffs only. Moreover, they have unlimited cognitive abilities and behave in a perfectly rational way. Yet, in practice people often do not behave this way. While empirical research is very difficult in contract theory, laboratory experiments have recently turned out to be an important source of data. In Part II, three experimental studies are presented that investigate contract-theoretic problems brought up in Part I.

Download or read book Essays on Contract Design and Incentive Provision written by Eva I. Hoppe and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in Empirical Contracting and Development written by Amrita Bihari Ahuja and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation's first essay explores the design and effects of incentive contracts in contexts with multiple products and multiple parties. Using data from a multi-product manufacturer in India, I test how incentives to two parties in its distribution network--salespersons and retailers--affect product sales. While profit maximization suggests equalization of returns, sales increases from salesperson incentives are six times those for retailer incentives. I provide evidence that differences in substitutability across products for the two parties, and the consequent differential costs of incentive provision, explain this disparity. The essay also traces the mechanisms by which incentives affect sales. Shifts in the allocation of salesperson effort between products and between retailers in different geographies, complementarities in effort, and information revelation through repeated interactions are all shown to be important. Finally, the essay argues that firms take these hidden incentive costs and interactions between parties into account when designing incentive systems.

Download or read book Essays in Contract Design Under Incomplete Enforcement written by Paula Cordero-Salas and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abstract: This dissertation applies relational contract theory to study the optimal incentive provision in situations when formal enforcement is too costly. Essay one considers a theoretical redistribution of bargaining power among business partners who trade repeatedly and that traditionally hold asymmetric power to negotiate contract terms. I included a bargaining process in a relational contracts model to analyze the economic consequences of shifting bargaining power under different enforcement regimes. The model predicts that as the agent's bargaining power increases, her incentive payments decrease even though her total compensation increases. Thus, efficiency wage contracts are more likely to be observed than contingent performance contracts in markets where agents have bargaining power. In contexts where enforcement is weak, a transfer of bargaining power can erode market efficiency in a dynamic relational contracting environment. If principals lose power coupled with the absence of enforcement, they may find the short-term gains of reneging on contractual promises more attractive than long-term benefits of faithfully executing a contract where they hold less power. As a consequence trade is more likely to break down. In this case, the agent is better off exercising less bargaining power than she has. Nonetheless, the model also predicts that such a collapse in good-faith execution of contracts in the light of such a power shift may not occur if some minimum payment for contract participation is enforced. Essay two provides experimental evidence on the theoretical predictions from essay one. I implement an experimental design that adjusts the bargaining power of sellers (agents) and the enforceability of the contract. I find that the vast majority of contracts take the form of efficiency wage contracts instead of contingent performance contracts when enforcement is partially incomplete and sellers have more bargaining power than buyers. The total contracted and actual compensation increase with the bargaining power of the sellers. However, sellers' profits are found to increase only if a part of the total payment is third-party enforceable. In this case, observed surplus and efficiency are lower than predictions. When no part of a contract is third-party enforceable, more cooperative relationships emerge, exhibiting higher quality provision resulting in higher surplus and efficiency while rent sharing is lower. The result is explained by the stronger buyer's deviation, confirming predictions from essay one. Essay three considers the application of relational contracts as a mechanism for the reduction of carbon emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD). I compared the structure of the optimal relational contract in the presence of purely self-interested participants to the optimal structure when participants are motivated by other preferences including altruism, spite, inequality aversion or warm-glow concerns. I find that the optimal contract structure only differs from the benchmark case of self-interested agents when seller preferences are different than only profit-maximizing preferences or if either party is inequality averse. Moreover, I also show that the presence of other regarding preferences increases or decreases the likelihood of cooperation in the long-term relationship relative to the case of self-interested participants.

Download or read book Incentive Contracts with Strategic Agents written by Jacques Paul Lawarrée and published by . This book was released on 1990 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Optimization and Incentive Contracts written by Pranava Raja Goundan and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: (cont.) In the second part of the thesis, we focus on the design and analysis of simple, possibly non-coordinating contracts in a single-supplier, multi-retailer supply chain where retailers make both pricing and inventory decisions. Specifically, we introduce a buy-back menu contract to improve supply chain efficiency, and compare two systems, one in which the retailers compete against each other, and another in which the retailers coordinate their decisions to maximize total expected retailer profit. In a linear additive demand setting, we show that for either retailer configuration, the proposed buy-back menu guarantees the supplier, and hence the supply chain, at least 50% of the optimal global supply chain profit. In particular, in a coordinated retailers system, the contract guarantees the supply chain at least 75% of the optimal global supply chain profit. We also analyze the impact of retail price caps on supply chain performance in this setting.

Download or read book Essays on Contract Theory written by Alice Peng-Ju Su and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 87 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation is primarily on the contractual design to account for various source of information asymmetry in a principal-agent(s) relationship. In the first chapter, I study the optimal provision of team incentives with the feasibility for the agents to coordinate private actions through repeated interaction with imperfect public monitoring. As the agents' imperfect monitoring of private actions is inferred from the stochastically correlated measurements, correlation of measurement noise, besides its risk sharing role in the conventional multiple-agent moral hazard problem, is crucial to the accuracy of each agent's inference on the other's private action. The principal's choice of performance pay to provide incentive via inducing competition or coordination among the agents thus exhibits the tradeoff between risk sharing and mutual inference between the agents. I characterize the optimal form of performance pay with respect to the correlation of measurement noise and find that it is not monotonic as suggested by the literature. In the second chapter, I study the optimal incentive provision in a principal-agent relationship with costly information acquisition by the agent. When it is feasible for the principal to induce or to deter perfect information acquisition, adverse selection or moral hazard arises in response to the principal's decision, as if she is able to design a contract not only to cope with an existing incentive problem, but also to implement the existence of an incentive problem. The optimal contract to implement adverse selection by inducing information acquisition, comparing to the second best menu, exhibits a larger rent difference between an agent in an efficient state and whom in an inefficient state. The optimal contract to implement moral hazard by deterring information acquisition, comparing to the second best debt contract, prescribes a lower debt and an equity share of output residual. With imperfect information acquisition or private knowledge of information acquiring cost, the contract offered to an uninformed agent is qualitatively robust, and that to the informed exhibits countervailing incentives. I relax the assumption of complete contracting and study truthful information revelation in an incomplete contracting environment in the third chapter. Truthful revelation of asymmetric information through shared ownership (partnership) is incorporated into the Property Right Theory of the firms. Shared ownership is optimal as an information transmission device, when it is incentive compatible within the relationship as well as when the relationship breaks, at the expense of the ex-ante incentive to invest in the relationship-specific asset as the hold-up concern is not efficiently mitigated. Higher (lower) level of integration is optimal with a lower marginal value of asset if the information rent effect is stronger (weaker) than the hold-up effect.

Download or read book Essays on Incentive Contracts Under Moral Hazard and Non verifiable Performance written by Anja Schöttner and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page 190 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in Contract Theory written by Fei-Lung Tzang and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on the Impact of Exogenous and Persistent Changes on the Provision of Incentives written by Vincent Tena and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In presence of an agency friction, incentive contracts are designed to align the manager's objectives with those of the owner of the firm. However, the contractual environment is subject to shocks beyond the scope of the manager that impact the future profitability of the firm. These shocks can be due for instance to a strengthening of regulations, changes at the market-level, or the emergence of a new alternative to the manager. Hence, it raises the question how contracts are designed when such shocks are anticipated at the contractual date. In order to understand this effect, we conduct three studies. In the first paper, we explore how an incentive contract evolves at the emergence of automation technologies that can replace the manager in the context of asset management. We study a continuous time principal-agent problem where the performance of an asset is determined by the manager's unobserved effort, and where the automation technology emerges in a uncertain future. Our model suggests that the empirically observed layoffs that accompany the emergence ofautomation technology may have a contractual foundation. For the second study, we explore how changes in the agent's ability to divert cash flow impact an optimal contract design. We build a continuous-time principal-agent model where the agent can divert cash flow out of the owner's sight. While it is straightforward that mitigating the agency friction is valuable for the firm's owner, its effect on the provision of incentives throughout the contractual relationship is unclear. First, our result suggests that the compression of the bonuses at the advent of the shock: the reduction (respectively, increase) of the expected bonus of good (respectively, poor) performers. Second, our analysis also predicts the regulation-induced retention of a poor performer, defined as maintaining an agent in place while his poor performance would have induced his dismissal in the absence of the shock on the benefitof cash-flow diversion. In the third study, we continue the previous investigation with an empirical study. We analyze the Compensation Discussion and Analysis introduced for the 2007 proxy season. We focus on how this reform has impacted the dismissal decision in S&P 500 non-financial firms. We find that the introduction of the CD&A act has significantly reduced the probability of forced CEO dismissal in S&P 500 non-financial firms. While prior literature has shown that exogenous shocks at the industry level impact the dismissal decision, we document that changes in the regulatory environment also matter.

Download or read book Essays on Optimal Dynamic Incentive Contracts written by Carsten Sebastian Pfeil and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Labor Market Contracts Design and Implications on Workers Incentives and Productivity written by Allan Dizioli and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 107 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on the Economic Incentives of Law and Contracts written by Juan Carlos Bisso and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How does the law affect the amount of information that is disclosed by a contractual relationship? This dissertation examines this question to predict the equilibrium outcomes that are influenced by different legal regimes.

Download or read book Essays on the Optimal Design of Long term Incentive Contracts written by Frederike Hinz and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Three Essays on Contract Theory and Applications written by Sunjoo Hwang and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three essays. The first essay examines a general theory of information based on informal contracting. The measurement problem--the disparity of true and measured performances--is at the core of many failures in incentive systems. Informal contracting can be a potential solution since, unlike in formal contracting, it can utilize a lot of qualitative and informative signals. However, informal contracting must be self-enforced. Given this trade-off between informativeness and self-enforcement, I show that a new source of statistical information is economically valuable in informal con- tracting if and only if it is sufficiently informative that it refines the existing pass/fail criterion. I also find that a new information is more likely valuable, as the stock of existing information is large. This information theory has implications on the measurement problem, a puzzle of relative performance evaluation and human resources management. I also provide a methodological contribution. For tractable analysis, the first-order approach (FOA) should be employed. Existing FOA-justifying conditions (e.g. the Mirrlees-Rogerson condition) are so strong that the information ranking condition can be applied only to a small set of information structures. Instead, I find a weak FOA- justifying condition, which holds in many prominent examples (with multi- variate normal or some of univariate exponential family distributions). The second essay analyzes the effectiveness of managerial punishments in mitigating moral hazard problem of government bailouts. Government bailouts of systemically important financial or industrial firms are necessary ex-post but cause moral hazard ex-ante. A seemingly perfect solution to this time-inconsistency problem is saving a firm while punishing its manager. I show that this idea does not necessarily work if ownership and management are separated. In this case, the shareholder(s) of the firm has to motivate the manager by using incentive contracts. Managerial punishments (such as Obama's $500,000 bonus cap) could distort the incentive-contracting program. The shareholder's ability to motivate the manager could then be reduced and thereby moral hazard could be exacerbated depending on corporate governance structures and punishment measures, which means the likelihood of future bailouts increases. As an alternative, I discuss the effectiveness of shareholder punishments. The third essay analyzes how education affect workers' career-concerns. A person's life consists of two important stages: the first stage as a student and the second stage as a worker. In order to address how a person chooses an education-career path, I examine an integrated model of education and career-concerns. In the first part, I analyze the welfare effect of education. In Spence's job market signaling model, education as a sorting device improves efficiency by mitigating the lemon market problem. In my integrated model, by contrast, education as a sorting device can be detrimental to social welfare, as it eliminates the work incentive generated by career-concerns. In this regard, I suggest scholarship programs aimed at building human capital rather than sorting students. The second part provides a new perspective on education: education is job-risk hedging device (as well as human capital enhancing or sorting device). I show that highly risk-averse people take high education in order to hedge job-risk and pursue safe but medium-return work path. In contrast, lowly risk-averse people take low education, bear job-risk, and pursue high-risk high-return work path. This explains why some people finish college early and begin start-ups, whereas others take master's or Ph.D. degrees and find safe but stable jobs.

Download or read book Essays on Contracts written by Zenan Wu and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of two essays on contract theory. I investigate contracts under different economics contexts. In the first chapter, I consider a two-period model in which the success of the firm depends on the effort of a first-period manager (the incumbent) and the ability of a second-period manager. At the end of the first period, the board receives a noisy signal of the incumbent manager's ability and decides whether to retain or replace the incumbent manager. I show that the information technology the board has to assess the incumbent manager's ability is an important determinant of the optimal contract and replacement policy. The contract must balance providing incentives for the incumbent manager to exert effort and ensuring that the second-period manager is of high ability. I show that severance pay in the contract serves as a costly commitment device to induce effort. Unlike existing models, I identify conditions on the information structure under which both entrenchment and anti-entrenchment emerge in the optimal contract. In the second chapter, I use a dynamic model of life insurance with one-sided commitment and bequest-driven lapsation, as in Daily, Hendel and Lizzeri (2008) and Fang and Kung (2010), but with policyholders who may underestimate the probability of losing their bequest motive, to analyze how the life settlement market--the secondary market for life insurance--may affect consumer welfare in equilibrium. I show that life settlement may increase consumer welfare in equilibrium when (i) policyholders are sufficiently overconfident; and (ii) the intertemporal elasticity of substitution of consumption (IES) of policyholders is greater than one.

Download or read book Essays on Contract Design in Marketing written by Ying Bao and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis examines how firms design their contracts in different marketing contexts. The first essay theoretically investigates the impact of external advances in consumption tracking technologies on the design of pricing contracts. Using the context of mobile banking applications that help consumers track their spending and avoid penalty fees for overdrawing their accounts, I find that in response to the availability of consumption tracking, a firm would lower its penalty fee (just enough to disincentivize consumers from using it). As a result, consumer welfare improves even if consumers do not use consumption tracking technology. When consumers vary in their forgetfulness, the availability of consumption tracking technology can hurt some consumers, while helping others. The second essay examines contracts in the context of new product development. I develop a theoretical model to explain the prevalence of standardized incentive plans, which provide a reward without considering the differential amount of resources invested in the projects. I model the phenomena where a representative project manager has private information about the quality of her own project and can manipulate the signal of project quality that the organization receives during the identification/resource-allocation stage. I show that when the manager manipulates the signal, a standardized incentive plan encourages the manager of a high-quality project to manipulate more and stand out. I argue that under some conditions a standardized incentive plan can be preferred because such a plan leads to more accurate resource allocation, even though a customized incentive plan is more efficient in inducing implementation effort.