Journal ArticleDOI
Moral Hazard in Teams
TLDR
In this article, the authors study moral hazard with many agents and focus on two features that are novel in a multiagent setting: free riding and competition, and show that competition among agents (due to relative evaluations) has merit solely as a device to extract information optimally.Abstract:
This article studies moral hazard with many agents. The focus is on two features that are novel in a multiagent setting: free riding and competition. The free-rider problem implies a new role for the principal: administering incentive schemes that do not balance the budget. This new role is essential for controlling incentives and suggests that firms in which ownership and labor are partly separated will have an advantage over partnerships in which output is distributed among agents. A new characterization of informative (hence valuable) monitoring is derived and applied to analyze the value of relative performance evaluation. It is shown that competition among agents (due to relative evaluations) has merit solely as a device to extract information optimally. Competition per se is worthless. The role of aggregate measures in relative performance evaluation is also explored, and the implications for investment rules are discussed.read more
Citations
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Journal ArticleDOI
Financial Intermediation and Delegated Monitoring
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors developed a theory of financial intermediation based on minimizing the cost of monitoring information which is useful for resolving incentive problems between borrowers and lenders, and presented a characterization of the costs of providing incentives for delegated monitoring by a financial intermediary.
Journal ArticleDOI
Multitask Principal–Agent Analyses: Incentive Contracts, Asset Ownership, and Job Design
Bengt Holmstrom,Paul Milgrom +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, a principal-agent model that can explain why employment is sometimes superior to independent contracting even when there are no productive advantages to specific physical or human capital and no financial market imperfections to limit the agent's borrowings is presented.
Journal ArticleDOI
Performance Pay and Top Management Incentives
Kevin Murphy,Michael C. Jensen +1 more
TL;DR: For example, the authors estimates of the pay-performance relation (including pay, options, stockholdings, and dismissal) for chief executive officers indicate that CEO wealth changes $3.25 for every $1,000 change in shareholder wealth.
Book
Performance pay and top-management incentives
Michael C. Jensen,Kevin Murphy +1 more
TL;DR: For example, the authors estimates of the pay-performance relation (including pay, options, stockholdings, and dismissal) for chief executive officers indicate that CEO wealth changes $3.25 for every $1,000 change in shareholder wealth.
Journal ArticleDOI
The Provision of Incentives in Firms
TL;DR: In this article, a review of existing work on the provision of incentives for workers is presented, and the authors evaluate this literature in the light of a growing empirical literature on compensation from two perspectives: first, an underlying assumption of this literature is that individuals respond to contracts that reward performance.
References
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Book ChapterDOI
An analysis of the principal-agent problem
TL;DR: In this article, the authors show that the optimal way of implementing an action by an agent can be found by solving a convex programming problem, and they use this to characterize the optimal incentive scheme and to analyze the determinants of the seriousness of an incentive problem.
Journal ArticleDOI
Prizes and Incentives: Towards a General Theory of Compensation and Competition
TL;DR: The authors analyzes the role of competitive compensation schemes (in which pay depends on relative performance) in economies and imperfect information, showing that when environmental uncertainty is large, such schemes are preferable to individualistic reward structures; in the limit, as the number of contestants becomes large, expected utility may approach the first best (perfect information) level.
Journal ArticleDOI
Optimal incentive contracts with imperfect information
Milton Harris,Artur Raviv +1 more
Posted Content
Security Pricing and Investment Criteria in Competitive Markets: Reply
TL;DR: In this paper, a security pricing model based on particular preference structures of investors, specified in terms of quadratic utility functions with final wealth as the argument of the functions, is presented.