Policies in Relational Contracts
研究企业政策如何约束关系合同，发现当代理人无法协调惩罚委托人时，委托人可能采用低效但依赖历史表现的政策来奖励高绩效代理人，并分析其对晋升、招聘和绩效的影响。
We consider how a firm’s policies constrain its relational contracts. A policy is a sequence of decisions made by a principal; each decision determines how agents’ efforts affect their outputs. We consider surplus-maximizing policies in a flexible dynamic moral hazard problem between a principal and several agents with unrestricted vertical transfers and no commitment. If agents cannot coordinate to punish the principal following a deviation, then the principal might optimally implement dynamically inefficient, history-dependent policies to credibly reward high-performing agents. We develop conditions under which such backward-looking policies are surplus-maximizing and illustrate how they influence promotions, hiring, and performance.