We analyze optimal contracts in a hierarchy consisting of a principal, a supervisor and an agent. The supervisor is either neutral or altruistic towards the agent, but his preferences are private information. In a model with two supervisor types, we find that the optimal contract may be very...

This paper derives optimal incentive contracts for agents with other-regarding preferences. It offers a behavioral explanation for the empirically observed lack of relative performance evaluation. We analyze a principal-multi agent model and assume that agents are inequity averse or status...

This paper studies the use of incentive contracts in the Bolton-Scharfstein (1990) model when some agents in the population are technically constrained from falsifying reports and stealing cash. The original Bolton-Scharfstein contract may not be optimal for a large range of parametric values....

This paper investigates monotone solutions of the moral hazard problems without the monotone likelihood ratio property. The optimal monotone solutions are explicitly characterized by a concave envelope relaxation approach for a two-action model in which the principal is risk neutral or exhibits...

This article explores a dynamic moral hazard setting in which a principal hires a team of agents for a project. As the project generates revenue upon completion, the principal incentivizes agents' efforts by designing bonuses for success. If bonuses are provided through spot or...

Technological progress has improved insurers' ability to monitor policyholders and has led to usage-based insurance (UBI) contracts that incorporate behavioral risk factors in pricing. Economic theory predicts that any informative monitoring signal should be adopted in equilibrium (see Shavell,...

This paper investigates optimal contracts to solve the moral hazard problem with subjective evaluations in the static environment in which the principal privately observes agents’ performances. Despite the limitations of feasible contracts that the principal can credibly offer, we show the...

We characterize optimal incentive contracts in a moral hazard framework extended in two directions. First, after effort provision, the agent is free to leave and pursue some ex-post outside option. Second, the value of this outside option is increasing in effort, and hence endogenous. Optimal...

A principal provides incentives for independent agents. The principal cannot observe the agents' actions, nor does she know the entire set of actions available to them. It is shown that an anti-informativeness principle holds: very generally, robustly optimal contracts must link the incentive...

We analyze the effects of wage floors on optimal job design in a moral-hazard model with asymmetric tasks and imperfect aggregate performance measurement. Due to cost advantages of specialization, assigning the tasks to different agents is efficient. A sufficiently high wage floor, however,...