Incentives and Discrimination
研究最优激励机制为何需要对完全相同的代理人给予不同奖励，并给出需要歧视的充要条件，对机制设计者理解激励与公平的权衡有参考价值。
Optimal incentive mechanisms may require that agents are rewarded differentially even when they are completely identical and are induced to act the same. We demonstrate this point by means of a simple incentive model where agents’ decisions about effort exertion is mapped into a probability that the project will succeed. We give necessary and sufficient conditions for optimal incentive mechanisms to be discriminatory. We also show that full discrimination across all agents is required if and only if the technology has increasing return to scale. In the non-symmetric framework we show that negligible differences in agents’ attributes may result in major differences in rewards in the unique optimal mechanism.(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)