Title
Optimal Contract to Induce Continued Effort
Abstract
AbstractWe consider a basic model of a risk-neutral principal incentivizing a risk-neutral agent to exert effort to raise the arrival rate of a Poisson process. The effort is costly to the agent, is unobservable to the principal, and affects the instantaneous arrival rate. Each arrival yields a constant revenue to the principal. The principal, therefore, devises a mechanism involving payments and a potential stopping time to motivate the agent to always exert effort. We formulate this problem as a stochastic optimal control model with an incentive constraint in continuous time over an infinite horizon. Although we allow payments to take general forms contingent on past arrival times, the optimal contract has a simple and intuitive structure, which depends on whether the agent is as patient as or less patient than the principal toward future income. This paper was accepted by Manel Baucells, decision analysis.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1287/mnsc.2017.2826
Periodicals
Keywords
Field
DocType
dynamic,moral hazard,optimal control,jump process,principal-agent model,continuous time,Poisson
Revenue,Decision analysis,Mathematical optimization,Economics,Optimal control,Incentive,Microeconomics,Principal–agent problem,Stopping time,Unobservable,Stochastic control
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
64
9
0025-1909
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
1
0.36
2
Authors
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Peng Sun142026.68
Feng Tian2692.48