阶梯激励合约下代理人行为与合约激励效果

Agent’s Optimal Response and the Performance of Step-wise Incentive Contract

基于委托代理理论研究了阶梯激励合约下的代理人行为,并从委托人角度探讨了最优合约设计的问题。在一般市场需求分布和代理人效用函数下,代理人的效用可能是其努力水平的双峰函数,且存在一个阈值使得当合约绩效奖励超过该阈值时,代理人的努力水平“跳跃式”增加。通过比较阶梯激励合约与其他两类激励合约发现,当代理人是风险厌恶型且代理人的产出完全依赖于其努力水平,委托人总是更偏好阶梯激励合约。

This paper investigates an agent’s response to a simple stepwiseincentive contract and the optimal contract design.We characterize agent’s optimal effortunder a general demand distribution and utility function.For an agent with concave utility,athreshold exists such that the agent’s optimal effort switches from zero to a higher level if the incentivebonus exceeds this threshold.Further,this bonus threshold increases with the performancetarget and agent’s marginal cost.The results stress the importance of identifying how bonus incentiveshould be coordinated with performance target in designing an effective step-wise incentivecontract.When agents are risk-averse,we show that the step-wise contract always outperforms alinear contract or piece-wise linear threshold contract if the performance of the agent only dependson his effort.