S-shaped incentive schemes and pay caps are fairly common in practice. This paper demonstrates the optimality of s-shaped incentive schemes and pay caps by incorporating salespeople’s aversion to pay inequity into the standard agency model. Our analysis shows that salespeople’s desire for pay fairness increases the convexity of the optimal incentive scheme at small sales but increases the conca...

This special report synthesizes the findings of a Health Care Financing Administration grant which allowed the author to analyze hospital finance in six foreign countries and in the United States. The author identified the principal problems facing hospital owners, carriers, and governments in the United States, and he conducted lengthy field work abroad to learn how each country dealt with the...

We consider mechanism design problems in which agents perceive Knightian uncertainty. Uncertainty is formalized using incomplete preferences, as in Bewley (1986). Without completeness, individual decision making depends on a set of beliefs, and an action is preferred to another if and only if it has larger expected utility for all beliefs in this set. We consider two natural notions of incentiv...

The paper provides a new proof of the positivity of the optimal marginal income tax, in a more general model, under weaker assumptions. The analysis focusses on the (weakly) relaxed problem in which upward incentive constraints are replaced by a monotonicity condition on consumption. Without upward incentive constraints, nonnegativity of the optimal marginal income tax is straightforward; stric...

This paper studies the relation between discrete-time and continuoustime principal-agent models. We derive the continuous-time model as a limit of discretetime models with ever shorter periods and show that optimal incentive schemes in the discrete-time models approximate the optimal incentive scheme in the continuous model, which is linear in accounts. Under the additional assumption that the ...

In this paper, a customer incentive scheme is proposed for retailers to build an effective demand response program over the peak demand period to minimize the financial risk. Firstly, an objective function is formulated based on the market operation and an optimal incentive price is derived from this objective function. Secondly, the incentive price is employed as a part of an incentive scheme ...