strategic delegation by unobservable incentive contracts many strategic interactions in the real world take place among delegates empowered to act on behalf of others managers make strategic decisions that affect profits sales persons have power over setting prices and lawyers and sports agents represent their clients in bargaining processes one of the central messages of game theory is that this could be at least partly due to the strategic advantage delegation may provide to the delegating party the idea that signing binding and publicly observable contracts with a third party may serve as a beneficial commitment device goes back at least to schelling 1960 and has been put into use in many areas of economics 1 however the observability of contracts appears to be a precondition for them to play a commitment role and for this reason almost all applications of strategic delegation theory are couched in terms of observable contracts the formalization of this intuition is given by katz 1991 who showed that if contracts are unobservable then the nash equilibrium outcomes of a game with and without delegation coincide in particular delegation through unobservable contracts does not change the predicted outcome of games with a unique nash equilibrium these observations in turn call the empirical relevance of the applied delegation studies into serious question since in most real world transactions the signed contracts are unobservable to the outside parties however there are important strategic environments that fall outside the confines of katz s analysis first katz s model does not include the scenarios in which the outcome of the decision of delegating or not delegating is observable to the outside party in contrast in some models it is natural that the outside party observes the outcome of this decision simply because s he

precommitment in competing vertical chains the design of distribution channels is an important marketing decision since a revision implies costly reorganization hence it makes sense to study strategic motives of alternative distribution devices a precommitment is a strategic move that affects the other players expectations on how oneself will behave and thus induces them to choose in one s own favor schelling 1960 how these tactics can be used by firms to favorably influence competition between vertical chains is the topic of the literature reviewed in this survey jel classification l22 l42 l81

asymmetric information as a commitment in oligopoly abstract in this paper we show that in an oligopolistic industry that consists of identical firms a subset of firms may find it optimal to commit to face asymmetric information about their agents operations therefore some firms may choose to incur informational agency costs even though information is available at no cost the commitment to face asymmetric information is also a commitment on the part of the firm not to extract the entire agent s surplus and so agents have incentive to make a specific investment that increases firms expected profits the level of this investment increases with the proportion of firms that are not informed

a combinatorial optimization approach to nonmarket environmental benefit aggregation via simulated populations this paper considers the use of a combinatorial optimization technique in the aggregation of environmental benefit values combinatorial optimization is used to statistically match population census data to a contingent valuation survey the matched survey and census information is then used to produce regional and national total willingness to pay figures these figures are then compared to figures derived using more standard approaches to calculating aggregate environment benefit values the choice of aggregation approach is shown to have a major impact upon estimates of total benefits at a regional level especially when the target population displays considerable heterogeneity across space

the principal agent relationship with an informed principal ii common values in many circumstances a principal may have relevant private information when she proposes a contract to an agent we analyze such a principal agent relationship as a noncooperative game the principal proposes a contract which is accepted or rejected by the agent who for most of our analysis has no private information the contract is executed if accepted otherwise the reservation allocation takes effect this allocation may be determined by a pre existing contract which the principal by her proposal is attempting to renegotiate or it may simply be the no trade point in this paper we assume that the principal s information directly affects the agent s payoff before solving the game we discuss pareto efficiency with asymmetric information we define an incentive compatible allocation to be weakly interim efficient wie if there exists no alternative incentive compatible allocation that both parties prefer for all possible beliefs that the agent might have about the principal s private information type we show that any wie allocation is interim efficient ie for some beliefs the rothschild stiglitz wilson rsw allocation relative to the reservation allocation l is the allocation that maximizes the payoff of each type of principal within the class of incentive compatible allocations that guarantee the agent at least the utility he gets from a irrespective of his beliefs about the principal s type the equilibrium set of the contract proposal game consists of the allocations that weakly pareto dominate the rsw allocation thus there is a unique equilibrium outcome if and only if the latter is ie and the equilibrium outcome is the rsw allocation itself after characterizing the equilibrium allocations we study those that are renegotiation proof when either the principal or the agent leads the renegotiation we then compare our contract proposal game which is a signaling model with its screening counterpart we conclude by extending our results to the case in which the agent as well as the principal has private information under the assumption of quasi linear preferences

on competing mechanisms under exclusive competition abstract we study games in which several principals design mechanisms in the presence of privately informed agents competition is exclusive each type of each agent can participate with at most one principal and meaningfully communicate only with him exclusive competition is at the center stage of recent analyses of markets with private information economic models of exclusive competition restrict principals to use standard direct mechanisms which induce truthful revelation of agents exogenous private information this paper investigates the rationale for this restriction we provide two results first we construct an economic example showing that direct mechanisms fail to completely characterize equilibrium outcomes even if we restrict to pure strategy equilibria second we show that truth telling strongly robust equilibrium outcomes survive against principals unilateral deviations toward arbitrary mechanisms

coexistence of strategic vertical separation and integration abstract this paper gives conditions under which vertical separation is chosen by some upstream firms while vertical integration is chosen by others in the equilibrium of a symmetric model a vertically separating firm trades off fixed contracting costs against the strategic benefit of writing a two part tariff exclusive dealing contract with its retailer coexistence emerges when more than two vertical cournot oligopolists supply close substitutes when vertical integration and separation coexist welfare could be improved by reducing the number of vertically separating firms the scope for coexistence diminishes when assumptions on contract observability and commitment are relaxed

product market competition and optimal debt contracts the limited liability effect revisited abstract this paper shows that asymmetric information between lenders and borrowers plays a crucial role in the existence of interactions between financial decisions and output market strategies lenders offer an optimal renegotiation proof financial contract which resembles a standard debt contract computing cournot equilibria debt causes firms to compete less aggressively the usual positive limited liability effect on quantities is offset by a negative one due to endogenous financial costs

exclusionary vertical contracts and product market competition this article considers whether a monopolist is able to deter more efficient entrants through contracting with buyers in the antitrust literature the chicago school s stand is that such contracts cannot be anticompetitive hence vertical contracts should be accorded per se legal status in a four stage game with the following features 1 the incumbent enjoys a first mover advantage 2 the entrant must incur some sunk cost to enter the market and 3 entry is uncertain the author shows that vertical contracts can be anticompetitive if there exists product market competition thus the author advocates caution in treating all contracts as per se legal a three factor repeated measures experiment tested the effect of leadership style charismatic structuring and considerate on performance improvement on a manufacturing task over four trials findings from a repeated measures multivariate analysis of variance indicated that individual exposed to considerate leadership had superior initial performance but that this difference faded over time further analysis indicated that self efficacy fully mediated the relationship between leadership style and performance copyright 1999 by university of chicago press

managerial incentives and the price effects of mergers most analysis of market power assumes that managers are perfect agents for shareholders this paper relaxes that assumption when managers of a multi product firm exert unobservable effort to improve product quality there is a trade off between providing adequate effort incentives and ensuring sufficient price coordination between the product divisions this makes some intra firm price competition optimal explaining why many multi product firms allow for competition between divisions when there are effort spillovers the optimal amount of price competition can be as great as when the products are under separate ownership even with some profit sharing intra firm price competition can reduce quality adjusted price which has important implications for antitrust policy

games played in a contracting environment we analyze normal form games where a player has to pay a price to a supplier in order to play a specific action our focus is on supplier competition arising from the fact that distinct suppliers supply different players and possibly different actions of the same player with private contracts where a player only observes the prices quoted by his own suppliers the set of equilibrium distributions over player actions coincides with the set of equilibrium distributions when all actions are supplied competitively at cost with public contracts the two distributions differ dramatically even in simple games

government intervention in production and incentives theory a review of recent contributions national science foundation the commissariat general du plan and the center for energy policy research at m i t

the value of transparency in multidivisional firms we study internal incentives transparency and firm performance in multidivisional organizations two independent divisions of the same firm design internal incentives and decide whether to publicly disclose their performances in each division a risk neutral principal deals with a risk averse exclusive agent under moral hazard each agent exerts an unverifiable effort that creates a spillover on the effort cost of the other agent we first study the determinants of the optimal principal agent contract with and without performance transparency then we show how effort spillovers affect the equilibrium communication behavior of each division both principals commit to disclose the performance of their agents in equilibrium when efforts are complements while no communication is the only equilibrium outcome when efforts are substitutes

corporate tax systems multinational enterprises and economic integration abstract multinational firms are known to shift profits and countries are known to compete over shifty profits two major principles for corporate taxation are separate accounting sa and formula apportionment fa these two principles have very different qualities when it comes to preventing profit shifting and preserving national tax autonomy most oecd countries use sa in this paper we show that a reduction in trade barriers lowers equilibrium corporate taxes under sa but leads to higher taxes under fa from a welfare point of view the choice of tax principle is shown to depend on the degree of economic integration

observable contracts strategic delegation and cooperation the role of commitments in noncooperative games is well acknowledged and documented one way to achieve commitments is by letting delegates represent the players of a game in this paper the authors study a delegation game in which the players can use agents strategically to play on their behalf and the contracts they sign with them are common knowledge they show that in such cases every pareto optimal outcome of the game can become the unique subgame perfect nash equilibrium of the delegation game the authors demonstrate this result by discussing the cournot type duopolistic game copyright 1991 by economics department of the university of pennsylvania and the osaka university institute of social and economic research association

agricultural growth poverty and nutrition in tanzania abstract rapid economic growth does not appear to have significantly improved poverty and nutrition outcomes in tanzania we link recent production trends to household incomes using a regionalized recursive dynamic computable general equilibrium and microsimulation model results indicate some inconsistency between recent growth and poverty measurements in tanzania we also find that the structure of economic growth may have constrained the rate of poverty reduction agricultural growth has been driven by larger scale farmers who are less likely to be poor and has been concentrated among crops grown in specific regions of the country slow expansion of food crops and livestock also explain the weak relationship between agricultural growth and nutrition outcomes we find that accelerating agricultural growth particularly in maize strengthens the growth poverty relationship and enhances households caloric availability while also contributing significantly to growth itself

information sharing between vertical hierarchies abstract when do principals independently choose to share the information obtained from their privately informed agents information sharing affects contracting within competing organizations and induces agents strategies to be correlated through the distortions imposed by principals to obtain information we show that the incentives to share information depend on the nature of upstream externalities between principals and the correlation of agents information with small externalities principals share information when externalities and correlation have opposite signs and do not share information when externalities and correlation have the same sign in this second case principals face a prisoners dilemma since they obtain higher profits by sharing information

adverse selection and renegotiation in procurement as was shown by dewatripont optimal long term contracts are generally not sequentially optimal the parties ex post renegotiate them to their mutual advantage this paper fully characterizes the equilibrium of a simple two period procurement situation and studies the extent to which renegotiation reduces ex ante welfare i a central result is that like in the non commitment case the second period allocation is optimal for the principal conditionally on his posterior beliefs about the agent ii the first period allocation exhibits an increasing amount of pooling when the discount factor grows iii with a continuum of types it is never optimal to induce full separation the paper also analyzes whether renegotiated long term contracts yield outcomes resembling those under either unnegotiated long term contracts or a sequence of short term contracts and it links the analysis with the multiple unit durable good monopoly problem

commitment through renegotiation proof contracts with third parties the paper analyzes contracts as means of strategic commitment that is commitment against outside parties to the agreement it considers the example of an incumbent firm which enters a contractual relationship with its workers in order to deter entry it assumes away the possibility for the parties to precommit not to make pareto improving renegotiations of the agreement once entry has taken place under symmetric information the contract is thus found to be useless for entry deterrence if the incumbent firm or workers possess some private information excessive post entry production levels can however be sustained ex post since output reductions may not be incentive compatible while information asymmetries are usually welfare decreasing when the goal is optimal risk sharing they can thus be welfare improving for the contracting parties when commitment against outsiders is the goal of the contract the role of the renegotiation process as a constraint on sustainable agreements is stressed in the paper and the general relevance of strategic contractual commitment is discussed

vertical separation with private contracts we consider a manufacturer s incentive to sell through an independent retailer rather than directly to final consumers when contracts with retailers cannot be observed by competitors if retailers conjecture that identical competing manufacturers always offer identical contracts symmetric beliefs manufacturers choose vertical separation in equilibrium even with private contracts vertically separated manufacturers reduce competition and increase profits by inducing less aggressive behaviour by retailers in the final market manufacturers profits may be higher with private than with public contracts our results hold both with price and with quantity competition and do not hinge on retailers beliefs being perfectly symmetric we also discuss various justifications for symmetric beliefs including incomplete information

participation constraints in adverse selection models abstract this paper characterizes the optimal contract offered by an uninformed principal to an informed agent when the latter s reservation utility depends on his type the informational rent is nonmonotonic so that interior types may have a vanishing rent or be excluded from trade the paper identifies conditions for the optimal contract to be separating to be nonstochastic and to induce full participation it also discusses the nature of the solution when bunching occurs the results are applied to nonlinear pricing under price cap regulation and bypass competition and to competition in nonlinear pricing journal of economic literature classification numbers d82 d42 d23 d78 l51 l15

nonlinear pricing in vertically related duopolies a vertically separated duopolistic market is analyzed in which manufacturers compete in wholesale price schedules and retailers in quantity under certainty there exists a continuum of equilibria the introduction of an uncertain demand parameter observed only by retailers dramatically reduces the set of equilibria quantity discounts emerge in markets with only moderately decreasing returns to scale in manufacturing and quantity competition downstream with additive shocks to demand the equilibria coincide with those of markets in which vertically integrated firms compete in supply functions before market uncertainty is resolved however generically equilibria in my model are not supply function equilibria

strategic trade policy design with asymmetric information and public contracts this paper examines strategic trade policy under asymmetric information with publicly observable contracts we analyse both the cases of unilateral and bilateral intervention we find that the requirement of incentive compatibility undermines the strategic precommitment effect when public funds are costly even with no restrictions on the form of the policies second when firms sell substitute goods the introduction of a rival interventionist government may reduce the cost of informational rents to each government third it turns out that under bilateral intervention there exists a continuum of symmetric equilibria with levels of output and corresponding levels of welfare in the exporting countries which can be ranked the requirement of ex post participation constraints for the firm limits the set of subsidies which can be offered to the firm in particular under bilateral intervention the equilibrium levels of output which are implemented under adverse selection are below their values under ex ante uncertainty i e below the equilibrium levels of output which are achieved when firms sign their contracts before the realization of their costs ever since the inception of research on strategic trade policy with the seminal paper by brander and spencer 1985 economists have been warning that the informational requirements of rent shifting policies are enormous and unlikely to be met in practice because the policy recommendations are highly sensitive to the particularities of the market in response a number of recent papers have begun to address the specific ways that informational failures affect policy and to modify policy recommendations to take such failures into account this paper analyses the implications of asymmetric information for strategic trade policy under both unilateral and bilateral intervention our complete information benchmark is a simple trade policy designed to shift rents similar to brander spencer two firms are competing in a third country and receive export subsidies from their respective governments however we place no restrictions on the form of these export policies previous literature has shown that under complete information a large number of outcomes may be sustained as equilibria of delegation games such as this moreover the introduction of uncertainty about the state of nature on the part of both

limited liability contracts between principal and agent abstract the optimal strategy of the principal is examined in an environment where there are ex post limitations on the maximum penalty that can be imposed on a riskneutral agent contrary to the case in which such limitations are not imposed it is in the principal s interest to deliberately forego the opportunity to induce socially efficient behavior and to instead design a contract that induces the agent to realize an efficient outcome only in the most productive state of nature and perhaps in certain very unproductive states the properties of the contract are examined in detail

the strategic choice of managerial incentives do firms with separate owners and managers maximize profits we address this question for an oligopoly where managers compete in quantities or prices as in the cournot or bertrand models and owners choose their managers incentives we find that there is a strategic aspect in the problem of selecting incentives and that profit maximizing behavior does not result in particular in the oligopoly we study the behavior of firms competing in quantity price more closely resembles perfectly competitive collusive behavior than cournot bertrand behavior

strategic aspects of vertical delegation abstract this paper offers an overview of the strategic aspects of situations where either institutionally or contractually a firm delegates some of its decisions to another firm a subsidiary an internal division etc delegation may have several kinds of strategic benefits in the short term it may improve the competitive position of the firm or induce a more lenient behavior from its competitors in the long run it may be used to deter the entry of potential competitors to foreclose market access or to induce actual competitors to exit the paper analyzes the trade off between these possible benefits and the agency costs of delegation and emphasizes the key issues of credibility and commitment

buyer power from joint listing decision we consider a model of vertically related markets in which an upstream firm faces a competitive fringe of less efficient suppliers and negotiates with customers that compete in a downstream market we allow downstream firms to form a buyer group which selects suppliers on behalf of its members we show that transforming individual listing decisions into a joint listing decision makes delisting less harmful for a group member which in turn enhances the group members bargaining position at the expense of the upstream firm we also discuss the implication for upstream investment incentives

entry and product variety with competing supply chains we study a model where an endogenous number of competing manufacturers located around a circle contract with exclusive retailers who are privately informed about their costs the number of brands in the market determined by the manufacturers zero profit condition depends on the presence of asymmetric information and on the types of contracts between manufacturers and retailers with two part tariffs wholesale prices fully reflect retailers costs with linear contracts wholesale prices are constant and independent of retailers costs the number of brands is lower resp higher with asymmetric information than with complete information when contracts are linear resp with two part tariffs moreover although the number of brands is always higher with linear contracts than with two part tariffs joint profits of manufacturers and retailers are higher with linear prices we also discuss manufacturers incentives to choose different contract forms and analyze the effects of endogenous entry on welfare

herding in delegated portfolio management when is comparative performance information desirable abstract we address the issue of investors asset allocation decisions when portfolio management is delegated to an agent contrary to predictions from traditional financial theory it is shown that investors may not induce their manager to allocate funds to the asset with the highest return instead they may herd in their asset allocation decision and induce trade in a particular asset because another manager is trading in it and despite the presence of a more profitable alternative doing so allows investors to write an efficiency improving relative performance contract on the other hand herding leads investors to design wage contracts strategically resulting in more aggressive and thus less profitable trade in equilibrium we show that herding occurs when the cost of information is high information precision is low and when managers are sufficiently risk averse moreover when investors can decide whether or not to disclose information about their manager s performance they will not do so

countervailing incentives in agency problems abstract we analyze countervailing incentives in agency problem countervailing incentives exist when the agent has an incentive to understate his private information for some of its realizations and to overstate it for others when countervailing incentives arise pooling generally characterizes the equilibrium contract furthermore performance is distorted both above and below efficient levels in addition the agent s rents generally increase with the realization of his private information over some ranges and decrease over other ranges we demonstate that the creation of countervailing incentives can enhance aggregate welfare

auditing claims in the insurance market with fraud the credibility issue abstract this paper characterizes the equilibrium of an insurance market where opportunist policyholders may file fraudulent claims we assume that insurance policies are traded in a competitive market where insurers cannot distinguish honest policyholders from opportunists the insurer policyholder relationship is modelled as an incomplete information game in which the insurer decides to audit or not the market equilibrium depends on whether insurers can credibly commit or not to their audit strategies we show that a no commitment equilibrium results in a welfare loss for honest individuals which may even be so large that the insurance market completely shuts down we also show that transferring monitoring costs to a budget balanced common agency would mitigate the commitment problem

in defense of lawyers moral hazard as an aid to cooperation abstract this paper studies strategic delegation in two player contests for an indivisible prize as in e g litigation where one party s probability of winning is determined by the relative investments of both even though neither player stands to gain anything from precommitment both players ex ante prefer compulsory representation by agents e g lawyers whose efforts are unobservable this delegation equilibrium is unaffected by secret renegotiation opportunities equivalently it does not matter whether contracts are observable or not hence the paper points out a role for delegation with moral hazard in facilitating cooperation an effect quite separate from precommitment journal of economic literature classification numbers c72 d72 d82 k41

national vs european incentive policies bargaining information and coordination abstract we build a hierarchical model of contractual relationships under moral hazard to address issues about subsidiarity i e optimal de centralization of incentive industrial policies at the national level or at the european community level incentive policy is viewed as an incentive contract for producers who take unobservable decisions that have spillover effects across member states a community agency designs contracts for producers and contractual compensatory transfers between states on the basis of its observations then national regulators and their home producers negotiate according to a generalized nash bargaining a national contract that complements the community contracts given that national regulators will have access to more observations on the producers activities in this setting we show that full centralization is never optimal we give sufficient conditions for complete decentralization to be optimal and when both policies are present we characterize how they interact to provide incentives to producers

competing vertical structures precommitment and renegotiation we consider a model where two agents privately informed about their own characteristics play a normal form game on behalf of two uninformed principals we analyze the existence of precommitment effects through public announcements of contracts in a model where agency contracts designed ex ante can always be secretly renegotiated at the ex ante and interim stages we show that the existence of precommitment effects depends both on the strategic complementarity of the agents actions and on the direct effect of the opponents actions on each principal s welfare in our model the possibility of renegotiation is crucial for the existence of precommitment effects the results are introduced through an example of cournot and bertrand competition between firms viewed as vertical structures

endogenous leadership in incentive contracts abstract we study the effect of leadership on incentive contracts in a moral hazard framework in our model agents are allowed to choose the timing of their actions the agents may choose their effort levels simultaneously or sequentially we show that relative performance evaluation leads to a subgame in which agents make simultaneous effort choices whereas joint performance evaluation yields a subgame in which agents make sequential effort choices since agents exert more effort in the sequential game the principal uses joint performance evaluation to induce the leader follower relationship among agents