Rank Uncertainty in Organizations
研究委托人如何通过私下提供基于团队成功的奖金，利用排名不确定性激励代理人工作，发现对称代理人奖金相同，歧视性方案非最优。
A principal incentivizes a team of agents to work by privately offering them bonuses contingent on team success. We study the principal’s optimal incentive scheme that implements work as a unique equilibrium. This scheme leverages rank uncertainty to address strategic uncertainty. Each agent is informed only of a ranking distribution and his own bonus, the latter making work dominant provided that higher-rank agents work. If agents are symmetric, their bonuses are identical. Thus, discrimination is strictly suboptimal, in sharp contrast with the case of public contracts (Winter 2004). We characterize how agents’ ranking and compensation vary with asymmetric effort costs.