Communication and Post-Decision Information
在委托代理框架下，分析管理者在决策后向所有者报告信息的行为，证明最优薪酬合同应依赖管理者私下观察的信号，解决双重道德风险问题。
Managers are frequently requested to provide information about factors which influence their performance which is subsequently used to determine their compensation. Since independent means of verifying the accuracy of the information reported may not be available, and since managers are governed by their own self-interests, it might seem futile for owners to request and rely on such information. Nevertheless, there are a wide variety of circumstances under which these requests are made-management forecasts, standard-setting, and bottom-up capital budgeting. Fulfilling and evaluating these requests consumes resources, so to provide a positive theory of this communication between managers and their principals requires demonstration of the strict superiority of management compensation schemes which depend upon the information transmitted over those schemes which ignore such information. In this paper, I offer a theory of this communication within the context of the principal-agent paradigm. This paper is closely related to Holmstrom [1979]. Holmstrom characterizes the circumstances under which the optimal contracts between a principal and his agent depend upon some publicly available signal other than output. I shall specify sufficient conditions for which optimal contracts will depend upon a signal privately observed only by the agent. This leads to two moral hazard problems in the situation analyzed here: one regarding the agent's selection of effort and one regarding the agent's