Download or read book Essays on Optimal Contract Design written by Jin Xu and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The optimal compensation contract is a very important issue for firms. Some empirical findings of wage structure in internal labor market are puzzling. For example, why are the compensation of workers more compressed than predicted by the classical theories. Why is the wage structure convex in hierarchical firms? This dissertation explores various important factors which may affect the optimal contract in the internal labor market. The first chapter characterizes the optimal contract when workers in the workplace care not only about theirown wage but alos their co-workers' wage. Specifically, I assume that workers are inequity averse model of Fehr and Schmidt (1999), I derive that the optimal wage structure is more compressed with inequity averse workers than with the standard workers. Inequity aversion among workers can also help explain the internal organization of the firms. For example, inequity aversion among workers may lead firms to employ only high productivity workers, even though the marginal product of a low productivity worker is higher than the worker's marginal cost. Chapter 2 examines two possibile realistic explanations for the convex wage structure in the hierarchical firms. Based on the multi-round tournament model of Rosen (1986), we incorporate heterogeneous stage effects. The first extension that can generate the convex wage structure is that the number of workers competing increases with the hierarchical levels. The second explanation is that the returns to effort increase with the hierarchical levels, which cannot generate the convex wage structure unless further assumptions added on optimal effort levels and cost functions. The third chapter investigates the underlying assumption in Chapter 1 that people are inequity averse to ex-ante payoff differentials. Specifically, an online survey is conducted to test whether ex ante or ex post fairness views affect people's decision making in a social context. I find that the ex post fairness views do make an important role in people's decision making. The results of the survey data do not support the model of inequity aversion.

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 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 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 Essays in Robust Mechanism and Contract Design written by Aleksei Suzdaltsev and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this thesis, we propose solutions to three problems in the area of robust mechanism design. The first two problems concern revenue maximization by a seller facing several potential buyers whose knowledge of the probability distribution of buyers' valuations is scarce. The third problem concerns contracting under unknown production technology. More specifically: In Chapter 2 (first substantive chapter), we consider the following model. An indivisible object may be sold to one of n agents who know their valuations of the object. The seller would like to use a revenue-maximizing mechanism but her knowledge of the values' distribution is limited: she knows only the means (which may be different) an upper bound for valuations. Valuations may be correlated. Using a constructive approach based on duality, we prove that a mechanism that maximizes the worst-case expected revenue among all deterministic dominant-strategy incentive compatible, ex post individually rational mechanisms takes the following form: (1) the bidders submit bids; (2) for each bidder, a bidder-specific linear function of the bid is calculated (we call it a ``linear score''); (3) the object is awarded to the agent with the highest score, provided it's nonnegative; (4) the winning bidder pays the minimal amount he would need to bid to still win in the auction. The set of optimal mechanisms includes other mechanisms but all those have to be close to the optimal linear score auction in a certain sense. When means are high, all optimal mechanisms share the linearity property. Second-price auction without a reserve is an optimal mechanism when the number of symmetric bidders is sufficiently high. In Chapter 3, we consider a related problem in which the valuations are constrained to be independent draws from a partially known distribution. The seller knows one or two moments of the distribution. We ask what would be a reserve-price in a second-price auction that maximizes worst-case expected revenue. Using a technique different from Chapter 2, we prove that it is always optimal to set the reserve price to seller's own valuation. However, the maxmin reserve price may not be unique. If the number of bidders is sufficiently high, all prices below the seller's valuation, including zero, are also optimal. In the final chapter, we seek a robust solution of a hidden-action, rather than a hidden-information problem. A principal is uncertain about a technology mapping an agent's effort to the distribution of output. The agent is risk neutral and there is a participation constraint but no limited liability constraint. Transfers can be costly. An example of this setting is the case where the principal is a society trying to properly incentivize a firm to carry out innovation. We first show that when the principal employs minimax-regret criterion in the face of the technological uncertainty, an optimal contract is affine. We then characterize the full set of optimal contracts. A contract is optimal if and only if it lies within certain affine, increasing bounds that collapse to a point when output reaches its maximum value.

Download or read book Essays on Optimal Policy Design in Macroeconomics written by Vadym Lepetyuk and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Contract Theory and Mechanism Design written by Alexander Rodivilov and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 109 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: My dissertation investigates optimal contracts for experimentation and a matching problem for the runway slot allocation. The first chapter of my dissertation examines the role of monitoring in experimentation where agents may observe success privately. In the benchmark model without monitoring, private observability of success is inconsequential as the agent never wants to delay announcing success. However, with monitoring of the agent's effort, private observability of success plays a role in choosing the optimal time for monitoring. When success is observed publicly, the optimal time for a principal to hire a monitor is at the start of the relationship. On the contrary, if the agent observes success privately, and the discount factor is high enough, monitoring is performed during the final period. The second chapter discusses optimal contracts for both experimentation and production. It can be optimal to pay a rent after failure and over experimentation can be optimal. Over production can occur in the exploitation phase. The third chapter considers a financially significant matching problem that emerges when inclement weather conditions strike an airport and runway slots must be reallocated.

Download or read book Essays on Optimal Contracts and Renegotiation written by Susanne Ohlendorf and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 111 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

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 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 Social Networks Optimal Contract Design and Present BIAS written by Marco Alexander Schwarz and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Dynamic Contracting written by Ilia Krasikov and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The thesis focuses on understanding the dynamic nature of contracts used in various economic context, specifically financial economics and industrial organization. The first chapter "A Theory of Dynamic Contracting with Financial Constraints'' draws on a large empirical literature documenting that small businesses are financially constrained, and operate at an inefficient level. In the paper, we build a theoretical model where financial constraints arise endogenously as a product of interaction between persistent agency frictions and agent's inability to raise external capital.The paper makes two general points. First, efficiency is a certainty in the long run, and it is achieved through monotone slacking of financial constraints. Second, persistence makes the path towards efficiency much more constrained in comparison to the model with the iid technology. In particular, we show that dynamic agency models with persistence predict a larger cross section of firms in the economy to be financially constrained.At a technical level, we invoke the recursive approach of \citet{aps}, using a two-dimensional vector of promised utilities as a state variable. We show that the optimal contract always stays in a strict subset of the recursive domain termed the shell, and the optimal contract is monotone within this set. We also verify that the results continue to hold in continuous time.The second chapter "Dynamic Contracts with Unequal Discounting'' looks at dynamic screening with soft financial constraints. In contrast to the first paper, the agent can raise money but at a different rate than the principal.We solve for the optimal contract and show that efficiency is not attainable with soft financial constraints. Therefore, the predictions of dynamic models of mechanism design are not robust to the assumption of equal discounting. For the large set of parameters, the optimal contract has the restart property- dynamic distortions are a function of the number of consecutive bad shocks, and once the good shock arrives the process repeats again. We also show that restricting attention to contracts which have the restart property is in general approximately optimal. The endogenous resetting aspect of restart contracts shares features of various contracts used in practice.In the third chapter "On Dynamic Pricing'', we explore dynamic price discrimination, extending a canonical model of monopolistic screening to repeated sales, where a seller uses timing of purchases as a screening instrument. The importance of time as an instrument for price discrimination has been understood since Varian [1989].In the paper, we are aiming to provide a formal analysis of pricing strategies to discriminate amongst consumers based on the timing of information arrival and/or the timing of purchase.A seller repeatedly trades with a buyer. Buyer's valuations for the trade follow a renewal process; that is, they change infrequently at random dates. For the model with two periods, We show that selling the first period good for a spot price and selling the second period good by optioning a sequence of forwards is the optimal pricing strategy. Specifically, at the outset, the seller offers an American option which can be exercised in each of the two periods. Exercising the option grants the buyer with a forward- an obligation to purchase the second period good for a specific price, and a strike price- a right to buy (or not) the good in the second period after learning his value. The buyer with a high valuation exercises the option in the first period, whereas one with a low valuation waits until the second period and then takes a call.We extend the analysis to the general continuous time renewal processes and assess the performance of price discrimination based on American options on forwards:i.optioning forwards is shown to be the deterministic optimum for the sequential screening problem- when the seller makes a sale in a single fixed period;ii.optioning forwards is shown to be the exact optimum for the repeated sales problem in the restricted class of strongly monotone contracts- when allocative distortions are monotone in a whole vector of buyer's valuations;iii.the optimum for the repeated sales problem in the unrestricted class of contracts is shown to be backloaded and a theoretical bound is provided for the fraction of optimal revenue that can be extracted by optioning forwards.Finally, the construction of dynamic pricing mechanism and bounds is ported to study repeated auctions.

Download or read book Essays on Principal agent Models written by Nadide Banu Olcay and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 173 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three chapters on principal-agent models. Chapter 2 studies an optimal contract design problem in a principal-framework whereas chapter 3 is an empirical investigation of the incentive contracts in the market of top executives. Chapter 4 is a theoretical chapter exploring welfare impacts of the structure in a top-level bureaucracy. In the first chapter, I consider a dynamic moral hazard model where the principal offers a series of short-run contracts. I study the optimal mix of two alternative instruments for incentive provision: a performance based wage (a "carrot") and a termination threat (a "stick"). At a given point in time, these instruments are substitutes in the provision of incentives. I am 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 her 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. Having inspired from chapter 2, chapter 3 of the dissertation is an empirical study of the contracts of Chief Executive Officers (CEO). Direct pay for performance and a threat of termination when performance is low are two important instruments to incentivize CEOs. This chapter is an empirical analysis of the use of these two incentive devices and how they depend on tenure and managerial ability. For managers promoted from within a firm, ability is proxied by their age at the time of promotion. For managers hired from outside, I instead rely on constructed measures of "reputation", based on media citations over time windows of different length. Using a sample of firms, listed in S & P 1500 over the period 1998-2008, I find that CEO compensation and the threat of forced turnover are used as incentive devices throughout tenure. Even though the results indicate that pay increases as the CEO is more senior in her tenure, there is no strong evidence that termination threat follows a particular time pattern. For outsider CEOs, a better reputation increases pay and decreases the likelihood of forced turnover, with stronger effects for more current reputational measures. Regarding the impacts of reputation on the tenure-pay relationship, only more current measures have a significant and negative effect. Managerial ability, as proxied by age-at-promotion for insiders and as proxied by reputation for outsiders, decreases the likelihood of forced turnover. More current reputation measures, as in the case of total pay, have a larger impact of likelihood of turnover. Chapter 4 investigates the welfare implications of multiple principals in the highest level of bureaucracy. An agent has to carry out two separate tasks, which can either be organized by two separate principals, or combined under one principal. The relationship between the top level (the principals) and the lower level (agent) of the bureaucracy is a "principal-agent problem". The existence of multiple principals generates a "common agency". The analysis reveals that the optimal hierarchy depends on the existence of "rents" from office that the principals enjoy. If there are no rents, the two systems are equally welfare-efficient. A single-principal model dominates common agency otherwise.

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 Novel Applications of Financing Contracts written by Paola Martin (Ph. D.) and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis comprises essays on three novel applications of financing contracts with the objective to improve supply chain efficiency. The first application concerns the procurement of vaccines for developing countries. Because pharmaceutical companies are reluctant to commit capacity and produce vaccines for developing countries, Global Health Organizations (GHOs) have proposed subsidy contracts to induce the manufacturing of such vaccines. In this context, we answer the question of how should an optimal contract be designed when the GHO is subject to different budget constraints. The second application revolves around supplier financing of retailer's inventories when retailer's sales are not observed by the supplier. In such situations, the supplier can either require the retailer to share sales information, or she can verify the retailer's sales by incurring a cost. We study whether there exist problem primitives under which the supplier could realize a higher profit by learning the retailer's sales through costly verification. The third application considers a more general business interaction between a Principal and an Agent. The Agent observes the business' proceeds but the Principal does not. However, she can learn it via costly verification. Moreover, the Principal may also not observe the effort of the Agent. The research question in this setting is whether the Principal can benefit from costly as opposed to cost-free verification. We also analyze the impact of different ways of splitting the verification costs between the two players. Each of the three essays proposes a framework within which to answer the respective research questions via analyses of equilibrium decisions of two strategic partners in a leader-follower game. This thesis contributes to the literature on Principal-Agent models by showing that the optimality of different contracts depends on the type of budget constraint and that costly verification can improve the profit of both the supplier (the Principal in Essay 3) and the retailer (the Agent in Essay 3) under information opacity about sales (the outcome of the business transaction in Essay 3)

Download or read book Essays on Contract Design in Behavioral and Development Economics written by Jonathan de Quidt and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in Dynamic Contract Theory written by Rui Zhao and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: