Incentives to Help in Multi-Agent Situations
研究多代理人情境中的道德风险问题，分析委托人如何通过薪酬方案设计任务结构，比较分工与团队合作的最优性，并给出团队合作最优的充分条件。
This paper concerns moral hazard problems in multi-agent situations where coopera- tion is an issue. Each agent chooses his own effort, which improves stochastically the outcome of his own task. He also chooses the amount of to extend to other agents, which improves their performance. By selecting appropriate compensation schemes, the principal can design a task structure: the principal may prefer an unambiguous division of labor, where each agent specializes in his own task; or the principal may prefer teamwork where each agent is motivated to help other agents. We provide a sufficient condition for teamwork to be optimal, based on its incentive effects. We also show a nonconvexity of the optimal task structure: The principal wants either an unambiguous division of labor or a substantial teamwork. THIS PAPER CONCERNS moral hazard problems in multi-agent situations where cooperation is an issue. We consider a situation where each agent can allocate his effort to various production activities called tasks. Tasks are assumed to be of each other: the outcome of each task depends on an exoge- nous random variable which is stochastically independent of the random vari- ables affecting the other tasks; and revenues from each task only depend on the outcome of that task. Relative performance evaluation therefore does not give a reason for the wage schedule to an agent to depend on the outcome of the tasks assigned to the other agents. (See Baiman and Demski (1980), Green and Stokey (1983), Holmstrom (1982), Lazear and Rosen (1981), Mookherjee (1984), and Nalebuff and Stiglitz (1983).) We focus on incentives of agents to each other. Each agent chooses his own effort level which improves stochastically the outcome of the task for which he is mainly responsible. Agents also choose the amount of to extend to other agents which improves the outcomes of their tasks. The principal, who cannot observe the effort chosen by each agent, designs wage schedules contingent on outcomes. By selecting appropriate wage schedules, the principle can design a task structure: The principal may prefer a specialized task structure, where each agent is inclined not to help other agents and specializes in his own task. In this case, by the assumption of independent tasks, each agent can be treated completely separately. The principal however may choose a nonspecialized task structure, called teamwork, in which agents are motivated