Essays on the Economic Theory of Contracts and Incentives

Essays on the Economic Theory of Contracts and Incentives PDF Author: Patrick W. Schmitz
Publisher:
ISBN: 9783844071160
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Essays on the Economic Theory of Contracts and Incentives

Essays on the Economic Theory of Contracts and Incentives PDF Author: Patrick W. Schmitz
Publisher:
ISBN: 9783844071160
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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The Theory of Contract Law

The Theory of Contract Law PDF Author: Peter Benson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521640385
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 365

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Book Description
Essays addressing a variety of issues in the theory and practice of contract law.

Incentive Contracts with Strategic Agents

Incentive Contracts with Strategic Agents PDF Author: Jacques Paul Lawarrée
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 418

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Essays on Contract Design and Incentive Provision

Essays on Contract Design and Incentive Provision PDF Author: Eva I. Hoppe-Fischer
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3658241330
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 211

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Book Description
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.

Essays on the Economics of Contracting and Institutional Choice

Essays on the Economics of Contracting and Institutional Choice PDF Author: Steven Curtis Hackett
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Institutional economics
Languages : en
Pages : 418

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Essays on Economic Theory

Essays on Economic Theory PDF Author: Tianjiao Dai (Ph.D.)
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 168

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Book Description
The first chapter considers team incentive schemes that are robust to nonquantifiable uncertainty about the game played by the agents. A principal designs a contract for a team of agents, each taking an unobservable action that jointly determine a stochastic contractible outcome. The game is common knowledge among the agents, but the principal only knows some of the available action profiles. Realizing that the game may be bigger than he thinks, the principal evaluates contracts based on their guaranteed performance across all games consistent with his knowledge. All parties are risk neutral and the agents are protected by limited liability. A contract is said to align the agents' interests if each agent's compensation covaries positively and linearly with the other agents' compensation. It is shown that contracts that fail to do so are dominated by those that do, both in terms of the surplus guarantee under budget balance, and in terms of the principal's profit guarantee when he is the residual claimant. It thus suffices to base compensation on a one-dimensional aggregate even if richer outcome measures are available. The best guarantee for either objective is achieved by a contract linear in the monetary value of the outcome. This provides a foundation for practices such as team-based pay and profit-sharing in partnership. The second chapter models a ride-sharing market in a traffic network with stochastic ride demands. A monopolistic ride-sharing platform in this traffic network faces a dynamic optimization problem to maximize its per period average payoff in the long run, by choosing policies of setting trip prices, matching ride requests and relocating idle drivers to meet future potential demands. Directly solving the dynamic optimization problem for the ridesharing platform is computationally prohibitively expensive for a traffic network with reasonably large number of locations and vehicles due to its intrinsic complexity. I provide an theoretical upper bound on the performance of dynamic policies by analyzing a related deterministic problem. Based on the optimal solution to the deterministic problem, I propose implementable heuristic policies for the original stochastic problem that yield average payoffs converging to the theoretical upper bound asymptotically. I also discuss the relative value function iteration method to solve the optimization problem for small-scale markets numerically. The third chapter examines several discrete-time versions of a dynamic moral hazard in teams problem, a continuous-time model of which has been extensively studied in the previous literature. The way to transform the continuous-time game into a discrete-time one is not unique, and different discrete-time assumptions with the same continuous-time technology limit lead to different discrete-time equilibria. Regardless of the technology assumption, I find that two-period models can give equilibrium results quite different from that in a continuous-time model: while the continuous-time model predicts existence and uniqueness of symmetric equilibrium, its two-period versions can either have multiple symmetric equilibria or none. Also, not all equilibria in the discrete-time models share features similar to the one predicted by the continuous-time model. The subsequent study of multiple-period models with no learning sheds some light on how the equilibria evolve as the discrete-time model better approximates the continuous-time one.

Essays in Law and Economics II

Essays in Law and Economics II PDF Author: Boudewijn Bouckaert
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Contracts
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
Selection of (anonymously refereed) papers presented at the Fifth Belgian Workshop on Law & Economics ... held at Ghent March 4, 1994.

Three Essays on the Economic Incentives of Law and Contracts

Three Essays on the Economic Incentives of Law and Contracts PDF Author: Juan Carlos Bisso
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780549829027
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
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.

Essays on Experimental Economics and Behavioral Contract Theory

Essays on Experimental Economics and Behavioral Contract Theory PDF Author: Stephen Leider
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 374

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Book Description
This dissertation consists of three essays using experiments and theory to apply behavioral insights to questions of contract theory and organizational economics. The first essay (co-authored with Judd Kessler) argues that an important aspect of incomplete contracts is their role in establishing a norm for the transaction or relationship, which increases the efficiency of agents' actions. We demonstrate experimentally that unenforceable handshake agreements within a contract can substantially increase the efficiency of subjects' actions, particularly in games with strategic complements. When there is a handshake agreement, adding an additional enforceable clause to the contract often does not further increase efficiency in our experiment. The second essay (co-authored with Florian Englmaier) analyzes a principal-agent setting where the agent has reciprocity preferences (the intrinsic desire to repay generosity). We identify the optimal contract, which typically includes both monetary performance-pay incentives as well as excess rents to induce gift exchange incentives. We then identify several organizational characteristics that can enhance or diminish the efficacy of reciprocity-based incentives. In the third essay (co-authored with Florian Englmaier) we test experimentally a key prediction of our general theory: the value to the principal of the agent's output (relative to the effort cost) should influence the agent's willingness to reciprocate generous wage contracts. Our results confirm this prediction, as well as providing additional evidence that agent's effort decisions are motivated by reciprocity.

Economic Analysis of Information and Contracts

Economic Analysis of Information and Contracts PDF Author: Gerald A. Feltham
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9400926677
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 412

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Book Description
The three coeditors knew John Butterworth for many years and had worked closely with him on a number of research projects. We respected him as a valuable colleague and friend. We were greatly saddened by his untimely death. This book is an attempt to remember him. We dedicate the volume to John with thanks for the contributions he made to our research, to the Faculty of Commerce and Business Administration at the University of British Columbia, and to the accounting profession. This volume contains twelve invited papers on the general topic of the economic theory of information and contracts. We asked leading scholars who had known John to contribute papers. The response was very gratifying. The authors provided us with new strong research papers that should make a lasting contribution to the accounting and information economics research literature, and make us all proud to have put this volume together. The research papers in the volume are in three sections: information evaluation in multi person conte)l:ts; contracting in agencies under moral hazard; and contracting in agencies with private information. We begin part I with Jerry Feltham's review of John Butterworth's pioneering contributions to the accounting and information economics literature. This is followed by an introduction to the papers in the volume and the papers themselves.