Moral Hazard and Observability
Summary (2 min read)
Two immediate corollaries follow:
- Under the assumption of Proposition 1, the second-best solution is strictly inferior to a first-best solution.
- Whenever f, exists, Corollary 2 indicates that a first-best solution cannot be achieved.
- The characterization in (7) has an intuitive interpretation in terms of deviating from optimal risk sharing to provide incentives for increased effort on the part of the agent.
- There are positive gains to observing the agent's action, since in that case a first-best solution can be achieved by using a forcing contract.
- Examples for which sharing rules are concave or linear or even two-peaked can be easily generated as well.
HOLMSTROM / 81
- This assumption says that the probability of an accident decreases with a so that each outcome x < 0 is less likely.
- Driving a car more carefully will presumably decrease the probability of both small and large accidents.
- This is the case if, for instance, falf is increasing in x (which holds for surprisingly many standard distributions; see Holmstrom (1977) ).
- To summarize the discussion the authors have: Proposition 2.
- Given the assumptions in (11), optimal accident insurance policies entail a deductible.
4. Optimal sharing rules based on additional information
- The interesting comparison is between s(x,0) and s(x, 1).
- Confirming their intuition, the repairman receives higher pay if it is found that the failure was outside his control than if it is found that a component that he controls failed.
- The optimal solution when y is not observed will lie initially between s(x,0) and s(x,1) and eventually go above s(x,1), since /i > /2. Notice that as k -> oo, s(x) -> s(x,0), since it becomes all the less likely that the failure will be caused by anything outside the repairman's control.
5. Value of information
- This signal is a conditional information system, where resources are invested to find out y only if the outcome is sufficiently bad (below x).
- It is readily seen that y is also informative and, depending on the costs of obtaining y, the net benefits of using y may exceed those ofy.
- The last two examples bring attention to the fact that Proposition 3 says nothing about how valuable y is, which would be important whenever costs for information acquisition and administration of more complex contracts are considered.
- An upper bound for the value is, of course, provided by the value one gets from observing a itself.
- Some indications of the value of the signal can be found by studying (13).
6. Asymmetric information
- For the sufficiency part of the proposition, an additional but insignificant qualification is needed.
- Yet, when integrating as in (25), it is conceivable that the right-hand side of (25) would become independent of y, making a function s(x) optimal and y valueless.
- This is extremely unlikely and will not happen generically; any small change in the problem data would take us out of such a situation.
- Thus, the authors can safely say that for all that matters, Proposition 3 is also valid in the asymmetric case.
7. Concluding remarks
- Of course, the analysis presented here leaves unanswered many interesting questions in contracting.
- One important aspect of the problem, which the authors have not considered, is that many contracts are based on long-term relationships.
- When the same situation repeats itself over time, the effects of uncertainty tend to be reduced and dysfunctional behavior is more accurately revealed, thus alleviating the problem of moral hazard.
- Another extension would recognize that asymmetry of information as discussed in Section 6 may warrant a renegotiation of the contract.
- One can view management by objectives and the New Soviet Incentive Scheme (Weitzman, 1976) as examples of this.
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Citations
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Cites methods from "Moral Hazard and Observability"
...This simple agency model has been described in varying ways by many authors (e.g., Demski & Feltham, 1978; Harris & Raviv, 1979; Holmstrom, 1979; Shavell, 1979)....
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Cites background from "Moral Hazard and Observability"
...It relates to the single agent-single principal literature (e.g. Harris-Raviv (1979), Holmstrom (1979) and Shavell (1979)) which develops conditions when monitoring additional information about an agent will help resolve moral hazard problems....
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References
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"Moral Hazard and Observability" refers background or methods or result in this paper
...The earlier one, used by Spence and Zeckhauser (1971), Ross (1973), and Harris and Raviv (1976), recognizes explicitly the dependence of x on a and 0, so that the expectations in (1)-(3) are taken with respect to the distribution of 0....
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...For earlier work on principal-agent models, see Wilson (1969), Ross (1973), and Mirrlees (1976)....
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...Earlier Spence and Zeckhauser (1971) and Ross (1973) gave alternative characterizations based on the state space formulation....
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...For earlier work on principal-agent models, see Wilson (1969), Ross (1973), and Mirrlees (1976). 3This fact, which is not observed by Harris and Raviv (1976), can be verified by using an argument similar to the one given by Mirrlees (1974, p....
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...The earlier one, used by Spence and Zeckhauser (1971), Ross (1973), and Harris and Raviv (1976), recognizes explicitly the dependence of x on a and 0, so that the expectations in (1)-(3) are taken with respect to the distribution of 0. They proceed to characterize an optimal solution by replacing (3) with the first-order constraint E{H, s xa + H2} = 0, and then apply the calculus of variations. To validate these steps one has to assume that an optimum exists and is differentiable. However, as an example by Mirrlees (1974) shows, there may commonly exist no optimal solution among the class of unbounded sharing rules, and for this reason s(x) has to be restricted to a finite interval in general....
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