Contracting with Heterogeneous Externalities
研究委托人如何向一组代理人提供契约以参与项目，代理人的收益取决于其他参与者的身份。在异质性外部性下刻画最优契约，发现其收益依赖于代理人间的锦标赛排名，且简单流行度指标无法实现最优排名。
We model situations in which a principal offers contracts to a group of agents to participate in a project. Agents' benefits from participation depend on the identity of other participating agents. We assume heterogeneous externalities and characterize the optimal contracting scheme. We show that the optimal contracts' payoff relies on a ranking, which arise from a tournament among the agents. The optimal ranking cannot be achieved by a simple measure of popularity. Using the structure of the optimal contracts, we derive results on the principal's revenue extraction and the role of the level of externalities' asymmetry.