Agency Theory and Uncertainty in Organizations: An Evaluation
评估代理理论在解释绩效结果不确定性方面的局限性，指出其忽略努力与结果关系的不完全知识及对努力和结果缺乏共识，导致理论普适性受限，且委托代理方法在合同设计中不切实际。
This paper evaluates agency theory as a theory of performance outcome. Agency theory attributes uncertainty in performance outcomes to moral hazard, adverse selection and the state of nature. This paper argues that by overlooking two critical sources of outcome uncertainty in organizations — incomplete knowledge about the effort-outcome relationship and lack of agreement about effort and outcome — the generalizability of the theory is strictly limited. Even in such settings where it is generalizable, principal-agent approaches to contract design are unrealistic to the extent that they presume that performance in organizations results exclusively from individual-contributor jobs, exagger ate the degree to which individuals are work-averse, and emphasize the quant ity of effort at the expense of the quality and type of effort. As a theory of performance, principal-agent approaches overstate the importance of opera tional effort and ignore the importance of facilitative effort such as team work.