Dynamic Incentive Contracts under Parameter Uncertainty We analyze a long-term contracting problem involving common uncertainty about a parameter capturing the productivity of the relationship, and featuring a hidden action for the agent. We develop an approach that works for any utility function when the parameter and noise are normally distributed and when the effort and noise affect output a...

We consider a Cournot duopoly with strategic delegation, where quantities of firms are chosen by their managers. A firm can offer its manager one of the two incentive contracts: the profit incentive or the revenue incentive. We show that in this setting there are Nash equilibria in which an inefficient firm obtains higher profit than its efficient rival. This result continues to hold under a ro...

We study the problem of the manager of a project consisting of two sub-projects or tasks which are outsourced to different subcontractors. The project manager earns more revenue from the project if it is completed faster, but he cannot observe how hard subcontractors work, only the stochastic duration of their tasks. We derive the optimal linear incentive contracts to offer to the subcontractor...

A contract where the agent is compensated ex post only upon satisfactory performance, often called a no-cureno-pay contract, can arise as under several circumstances. In this paper, we model the problem of contractual choice as a principal-agent contract which is modified due to hidden information about the competence of the agent to fulfill the obligations of the contract. The agent offers a c...

We develop a model of nonstationary relational contracts in order to study internal wage dynamics. Workers are heterogenous and each workers’ ability is both private information and fixed for all time. Learning therefore occurs within employment relationships. The inferences, however, are confounded by moral hazard: the distribution of output is determined by both the worker’s type and by his u...

We develop a model of nonstationary relational contracts in order to study internal wage dynamics. Workers are heterogeneous and each worker’s ability is both private information and fixed for all time. Learning therefore occurs within employment relationships. The inferences, however, are confounded by moral hazard: the distribution of output is determined by both the worker’s type and by his ...

We study the effect of physician incentives in an HMO network. Physician incentives are controversial because they may induce doctors to make treatment decisions that differ from those they would chose in the absence of incentives. We set out a theoretical framework for assessing the degree to which incentive contracts do in fact induce physicians to deviate from a standard guided only by patie...

Managed care organizations rely on incentives that encourage physicians to limit medical expenditures, but little is known about how physicians respond to these incentives. We address this issue by analyzing the physician incentive contracts in use at a Health Maintenance Organization (HMO). By combining knowledge of the incentive contracts with internal company records, we examine how medical ...

The literature on relational incentive contracts suggests that rms may be able to condition payments to employees on information that is not available to those outside the rm. Given this, market participants may use the magnitude of such payments to infer the non-public information, which then may give rms a reason to choose wage payments strategically. We combine the literatures on relational ...