Kohei Daido

Team Incentives and Reference-Dependent Preferences ∗

This paper examines a multi-agent moral hazard model in which agents have expectation-based reference-dependent preferences `a la K˝oszegi and Rabin (2006, 2007). The agents’ utilities depend not only on their realized outcomes but also on the comparisons of their realized outcomes with their reference outcomes. Due to loss aversion, the agents have a first-order aversion to wage uncertainty. Thus, reducing their expected losses by partially compensating for their failure may be beneficial for the principal. When the agent is loss averse and the project is hard to achieve, the optimal contract is based on team incentives which exhibit either joint performance evaluation or relative performance evaluation. Our results provide a new insight: team incentives serve as a loss-sharing device among agents. This model can explain the empirical puzzle of why firms often pay a bonus to low-performance employees as well as high-performance employees.

Peer Pressure and Incentives

We study the effects of peer pressure on incentives. To this end, we extend a multiagent model with moral hazard and limited liability by introducing a peer pressure function. We show that the optimal incentive for the less productive agent is more high powered than that for the more productive agent in the case with peer pressure. Moreover, in comparison with the case without peer pressure, the optimal incentive for the less productive agent becomes more high powered, while the optimal incentive for the more productive agent becomes less high powered.

Distributive Policy with Labor Mobility and the Samaritan's Dilemma

We consider a model with two countries in which each government redistributes income between two types of individuals (the rich and the poor). This model shows that an increase in the mobility of individuals induces intensive tax competition across countries and lowers the level of redistribution undertaken by each country. However, this lower level of redistribution enhances individuals f efforts to raise his own labor income and alleviates the consequences of the Samaritan fs dilemma. Welfare evaluation of economic integration should be based on the balance of these two competing effects.

Incentives, Identity, and Organizational Forms

Abstract This paper studies the optimal organizational form and the optimal type of manager by considering the nonmaterial (psychological) payoff as well as the standard material payoff for agents. I compare two organizational forms: T-form, where all agents have the same job title so that they are in a single reference group; and H-form, where one agent is appointed to be the manager and the others are subordinates who form a reference group. I show that the principal should appoint a more (less) able agent to be the manager when the effects of peer pressure are more (less) critical. In addition, I find the conditions under which H-form is more likely to be preferred to T-form. Finally, I discuss the phenomenon of the proliferation of job titles in the context of this model.