Essays on the Optimal Design of Long-term Incentive Contracts

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ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (134 download)

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Book Synopsis Essays on the Optimal Design of Long-term Incentive Contracts by : Frederike Hinz

Download or read book Essays on the Optimal Design of Long-term Incentive Contracts written by Frederike Hinz and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Essays on Contract Design and Incentive Provision

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Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 3658241330
Total Pages : 211 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (582 download)

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Book Synopsis Essays on Contract Design and Incentive Provision by : Eva I. Hoppe-Fischer

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.

Essays on Optimal Dynamic Incentive Contracts

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ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 150 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (844 download)

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Book Synopsis Essays on Optimal Dynamic Incentive Contracts by : Carsten Sebastian Pfeil

Download or read book Essays on Optimal Dynamic Incentive Contracts written by Carsten Sebastian Pfeil and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 150 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Essays on Optimization and Incentive Contracts

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ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 176 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (191 download)

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Book Synopsis Essays on Optimization and Incentive Contracts by : Pranava Raja Goundan

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.

Essays on Dynamic Incentive Design

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ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 336 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (129 download)

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Book Synopsis Essays on Dynamic Incentive Design by : Mustafa Dogan

Download or read book Essays on Dynamic Incentive Design written by Mustafa Dogan and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three essays that examine incentive problems within various dynamic environments. In Chapter 1, I study the optimal design of a dynamic regulatory system that encourages regulated agents to monitor their activities and voluntarily report their violations. Self-monitoring is a private and costly process, and comprises the core of the incentive problem. There are no monetary transfers. Instead, the regulator (she) uses future regulatory behavior for incentive provision. When the regulator has full commitment power, she can induce costly self-monitoring and revelation of "bad news" in the initial phase of the optimal policy. During this phase, the agent is promised a higher continuation utility (in the form of future regulatory approval) each time he discloses "bad news." If the regulator internalizes self-monitoring costs, the agent is either blacklisted or whitelisted in the long run. When she does not internalize these costs, blacklisting is replaced by a temporary probation state, and whitelisting becomes the unique long run outcome. This result suggests that whitelisting, which may appear to be a form of regulatory capture, may instead be a consequence of optimal policy. In Chapter 2, I study the dynamic pricing problem of a durable good monopolist with commitment power, when a new version of the good is expected at some point in the future. The new version of the good is superior to the existing one, bringing a higher flow utility. The buyers are heterogeneous in terms of their valuations and strategically time their purchases. When the arrival is a stationary stochastic process, the corresponding optimal price path is shown to be constant for both versions of the good, hence there is no delay on purchases and time is not used to discriminate over buyers, which is in line with the literature. However, if the arrival of the new version occurs at a commonly known deterministic date, then the price path may decrease over time, resulting in delayed purchases. For both arrival processes, posted prices is a sub-optimal selling mechanism. The optimal one involves bundling of both versions of the good and selling them only together, which can easily be implemented by selling the initial version of the good with a replacement guarantee. Finally, Chapter 3 examines the question under what conditions can automation be less desirable compared to human labor. We study a firm that has to decide between a human-human team and a human-machine team for production. The effort choice of a human employee is not observed by the manager, therefore the incentives need to be properly aligned. We argue that, despite the desirable benefits resulting from the partial substitution of labor with automated machines such as less costly machine input and reduced scope of moral hazard, the teams with only human employees can, under some conditions, be more preferred over the human-machine teams. This stems from the fact that, in all-human teams, the principal, through the selection of incentive scheme, can control the interaction among the agents and get benefit from the mutual monitoring capacity between them. The automation, however, eliminates this interaction and shuts down a channel that can potentially help to mitigate the overall agency problem.

Optimal Incentive Contracts in the Presence of Career Concerns

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ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 70 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 ( download)

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Book Synopsis Optimal Incentive Contracts in the Presence of Career Concerns by : Robert Gibbons

Download or read book Optimal Incentive Contracts in the Presence of Career Concerns written by Robert Gibbons and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 70 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This paper studies career concerns -- concerns about the effects of current performance on future compensation -- and describes how optimal incentive contracts are affected when career concerns are taken into account. Career concerns arise frequently: they occur whenever the market uses a worker's current output to update its belief about the worker's ability and competition then forces future wages (or wage contracts) to reflect these updated beliefs. Career concerns are stronger when a worker is further from retirement, because a longer prospective career increases the return to changing the market's belief. In the presence of career concerns, the optimal compensation contract optimizes total incentives -- the combination of the implicit incentives from career concerns and the explicit incentives from the compensation contract. Thus, the explicit incentives from the optimal compensation contract should be strongest when a worker is close to retirement. We find empirical support for this prediction in the relation between chief-executive compensation and stock-market performance.

Optimal Design of Incentive Contracts for Temporal Activities

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ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (719 download)

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Book Synopsis Optimal Design of Incentive Contracts for Temporal Activities by : Kent Davis Hertzing

Download or read book Optimal Design of Incentive Contracts for Temporal Activities written by Kent Davis Hertzing and published by . This book was released on 1976 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Essays on Contract Design and Incentive Provision

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Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9783937404974
Total Pages : 211 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (49 download)

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Book Synopsis Essays on Contract Design and Incentive Provision by : Eva I. Hoppe

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:

Essays in Contract Design Under Incomplete Enforcement

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ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 185 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (747 download)

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Book Synopsis Essays in Contract Design Under Incomplete Enforcement by : Paula Cordero-Salas

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.

'Yes Men', Integrity, and the Optimal Design of Incentive Contracts

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ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (137 download)

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Book Synopsis 'Yes Men', Integrity, and the Optimal Design of Incentive Contracts by : Christian Ewerhart

Download or read book 'Yes Men', Integrity, and the Optimal Design of Incentive Contracts written by Christian Ewerhart and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a pioneering approach towards the explanation of the phenomenon of "yes man" behavior in organizations, Prendergast [American Economic Review 83 (1993) 757-770] argued that incentive contracts in employment relationships generally make a worker distort his privately acquired information. This would imply that there is a trade-off between inducing a worker to exert costly effort and inducing him to tell the truth. In contrast, we show that with optimally designed contracts, which we term integrity contracts, the worker will both exert effort and report his information truthfully, and hence the first best can be achieved.

Selected Works of Joseph E. Stiglitz

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Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199533717
Total Pages : 904 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (995 download)

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Book Synopsis Selected Works of Joseph E. Stiglitz by : Joseph E. Stiglitz

Download or read book Selected Works of Joseph E. Stiglitz written by Joseph E. Stiglitz and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 904 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The second in a series of six volumes containing a selection of Joseph Stiglitz's most important and widely cited work. Volume I set out the basic concepts underlying the economics of information. Volume II extends these concepts and applies them to a number of different settings in labour, capital, and product markets

The Oxford Handbook of Corporate Law and Governance

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Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0191061409
Total Pages : 900 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis The Oxford Handbook of Corporate Law and Governance by : Jeffrey N. Gordon

Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Corporate Law and Governance written by Jeffrey N. Gordon and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2018-04-26 with total page 900 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Corporate law and corporate governance have been at the forefront of regulatory activities across the world for several decades now, and are subject to increasing public attention following the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. The Oxford Handbook of Corporate Law and Governance provides the global framework necessary to understand the aims and methods of legal research in this field. Written by leading scholars from around the world, the Handbook contains a rich variety of chapters that provide a comparative and functional overview of corporate governance. It opens with the central theoretical approaches and methodologies in corporate law scholarship in Part I, before examining core substantive topics in corporate law, including shareholder rights, takeovers and restructuring, and minority rights in Part II. Part III focuses on new challenges in the field, including conflicts between Western and Asian corporate governance environments, the rise of foreign ownership, and emerging markets. Enforcement issues are covered in Part IV, and Part V takes a broader approach, examining those areas of law and finance that are interwoven with corporate governance, including insolvency, taxation, and securities law as well as financial regulation. The Handbook is a comprehensive, interdisciplinary resource placing corporate law and governance in its wider context, and is essential reading for scholars, practitioners, and policymakers in the field.

Three Essays on the Impact of Exogenous and Persistent Changes on the Provision of Incentives

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ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (126 download)

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Book Synopsis Three Essays on the Impact of Exogenous and Persistent Changes on the Provision of Incentives by : Vincent Tena

Download or read book Three Essays on the Impact of Exogenous and Persistent Changes on the Provision of Incentives written by Vincent Tena and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In presence of an agency friction, incentive contracts are designed to align the manager's objectives with those of the owner of the firm. However, the contractual environment is subject to shocks beyond the scope of the manager that impact the future profitability of the firm. These shocks can be due for instance to a strengthening of regulations, changes at the market-level, or the emergence of a new alternative to the manager. Hence, it raises the question how contracts are designed when such shocks are anticipated at the contractual date. In order to understand this effect, we conduct three studies. In the first paper, we explore how an incentive contract evolves at the emergence of automation technologies that can replace the manager in the context of asset management. We study a continuous time principal-agent problem where the performance of an asset is determined by the manager's unobserved effort, and where the automation technology emerges in a uncertain future. Our model suggests that the empirically observed layoffs that accompany the emergence ofautomation technology may have a contractual foundation. For the second study, we explore how changes in the agent's ability to divert cash flow impact an optimal contract design. We build a continuous-time principal-agent model where the agent can divert cash flow out of the owner's sight. While it is straightforward that mitigating the agency friction is valuable for the firm's owner, its effect on the provision of incentives throughout the contractual relationship is unclear. First, our result suggests that the compression of the bonuses at the advent of the shock: the reduction (respectively, increase) of the expected bonus of good (respectively, poor) performers. Second, our analysis also predicts the regulation-induced retention of a poor performer, defined as maintaining an agent in place while his poor performance would have induced his dismissal in the absence of the shock on the benefitof cash-flow diversion. In the third study, we continue the previous investigation with an empirical study. We analyze the Compensation Discussion and Analysis introduced for the 2007 proxy season. We focus on how this reform has impacted the dismissal decision in S&P 500 non-financial firms. We find that the introduction of the CD&A act has significantly reduced the probability of forced CEO dismissal in S&P 500 non-financial firms. While prior literature has shown that exogenous shocks at the industry level impact the dismissal decision, we document that changes in the regulatory environment also matter.

Essays on Principal-agent Models

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ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 173 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (89 download)

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Book Synopsis Essays on Principal-agent Models by : Nadide Banu Olcay

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.

Firms, Markets, and Contracts

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Publisher : Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN 13 : 3642469884
Total Pages : 306 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (424 download)

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Book Synopsis Firms, Markets, and Contracts by : Ekkehart Schlicht

Download or read book Firms, Markets, and Contracts written by Ekkehart Schlicht and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Modern institutional economics witnesses a merging of formal and informal strands of theorizing. This development has offered new and vigorous perspectives which avoid both arbitrariness and theoretical sterility. The essays on contract theory gathered here exemplify this development. They propone new results on central issues in contractual theorizing. The theory of the firm in its variegated aspects forms, naturally, the core of the present set of contributions. Issues of ownership, integration, delegation, and finan ce are analyzed. Some contributions use the theoretical approach of contract theory to explore other issues, like medical care, public good problems, the economics of crime, environmental economics, and international trade. The contributors are leading young economists. They have participated in one or se veral classes of the 'International Summer School on the New Institutional Economics' which has been organized by Rudolf Richter in the years 1988 through 1994 and is now continued by Urs Schweizer. The theoretical style of these contributions has been influ enced by this experience. This collection of essays is intended to express the thanks of the contributors to Rudolf Richter. His initiatives for scholarly instruction and for inter national exchange of ideas have helped to create and to diffuse the understanding of and the engagement for the new institutional economics in Europe.

Essays on Management Accounting and Incentive Contracts for Some New Production and Selling Strategies

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ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 282 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (319 download)

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Book Synopsis Essays on Management Accounting and Incentive Contracts for Some New Production and Selling Strategies by : Seok-Young Lee

Download or read book Essays on Management Accounting and Incentive Contracts for Some New Production and Selling Strategies written by Seok-Young Lee and published by . This book was released on 1992 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Essays on Optimal Contract Design

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ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 136 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (913 download)

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Book Synopsis Essays on Optimal Contract Design by : Jin Xu

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.