This note demonstrates how performance measure congruity and noise determine an agency’s total surplus within an linear agency framework with multiple tasks. It provides a decomposition of agency costs, leading back to a congruity index previously proposed in the literature. In addition,...

In this paper, a promotion tournament is considered, where, at the beginning of the tournament, it is unknown how long the tournament lasts. Further, the promotion decision is based on the assessments of a supervisor with imperfect recall. In line with psychological research, the supervisor is...

This paper addresses the selection problem in promotion tournaments. I consider a situation with heterogeneous employees and ask whether an employer might be interested in repeating a promotion tournament. On the one hand, this yields a reduction in uncertainty over the employees’...

In this paper, a formal rent-seeking theory of the firm is developed. The main idea is that integration (compared to non-integration) facilitates rent-seeking for the integrating party, but makes it harder for the integrated one. In a one-period model, this implies that the rent-seeking contest...

This paper studies sabotage in a dynamic tournament. Three players compete in two rounds. In the final round, a player who is leading in the race, but not yet beyond the reach of his competitors, gets sabotaged more heavily. As a consequence, if players are at the same position initially, they...

This paper investigates the role of variance analysis procedures in aligning objectives under the condition of distorted performance measurement. A riskneutral agency with linear contracts is analyzed, whereby the agent receives postcontract, pre-decision information on his productivity. If the...

We consider a situation where an agent's effort is monitored by a supervisor who cares for the agent's well being. This is modeled by incorporating the agent's utility into the utility function of the supervisor. The first best solution can be implemented even if the supervisor's preferences are...

This paper analyzes the use of alternative performance measures in an agency model in which contracting incorporates both formal and informal agreements. It is shown that under a proper use of verifiable and unverifiable performance measures, the two types of contracts are complements,...

We analyze a two-period agency problem with limited liability and nonverifiable information. The principal commits to a dynamic bonus pool comprising a fixed total payment that may be distributed over time to the agent and a third party. We find that the optimal two-period contract features...

I examine how a firm’s opportunity to verify information influences the joint use of verifiable and unverifiable information for incentive contracting. I employ a simple two-period agency model, in which contract frictions arise from limited liability and the potential unverifiability of...