Contract Design by Service Providers with Private Effort
研究了服务环境中两种常见定价方案（按小时计费和两部定价）在买方估值不可见且提供商努力可能不可见时的表现，发现按报告努力签约时两部定价可达到公开努力下的利润，而按小时计费的利润在较大参数范围内与两部定价相当。
We investigate the performance of two commonly used pricing schemes—hourly-rate contract and two-part tariff—in service environments where the buyer’s valuation is invisible to the service provider and the provider’s effort may not be visible to the buyer. In the private effort environment, we further distinguish between situations where the contract may be based on the outcome or on the effort reported by the provider. We show that under the two-part tariff, when effort is private, the provider can achieve the same profit as under public effort by contracting on reported effort and will be worse off by contracting on outcome. Under the hourly-rate contract, compared with the public effort case, the provider may be better or worse off in keeping effort private and contracting on the reported effort, and the trade-off is affected by the degree of outcome uncertainty in a nontrivial way. We find that a provider’s profits under an hourly-rate contract are as good as under a two-part tariff over a sizable parameter regime when contracting on reported effort. The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2017.2743 . This paper was accepted by Vishal Gaur, operations management.