Roland Strausz

Contracting with Imperfect Commitment and the Revelation Principle: The Single Agent Case

This paper extends the revelation principle to environments in which the mechanism designer cannot fully commit to the outcome induced by the mechanism. We show that he may optimally use a direct mechanism under which truthful revelation is an optimal strategy for the agent. In contrast with the conventional revelation principle, however, the agent may not use this strategy with probability one. Our results apply to contracting problems between a principal and a single agent. By reducing such problems to well-defined programming problems they provide a basic tool for studying imperfect commitment.

Delegation of Monitoring in a Principal-Agent Relationship

This paper studies a principal-agent relationship with moral hazard in which the principal or the supervisor can monitor the agents hidden action by using identical monitoring technologies. The paper shows that delegation of monitoring to the supervisor is profitable because of two effects. With delegation the principal can better regulate the incentives (incentive effect) and can commit to wage structures to which she could not commit without delegation (commitment effect). As a logical step collusion is introduced and it is shown that even with the possibility of collusion delegation is an optimal strategy.

Regulatory Risk Under Optimal Incentive Regulation

The paper provides a tractable, analytical framework to study regulatory risk. Regulatory risk is captured by uncertainty about the policy variables in the regulator’s objective function: weights attached to profits and costs of public funds. Results are as follows: 1) The regulator’s reaction to regulatory risk depends on the curvature of aggregate demand. 2) It yields a positive information rent effect exactly when demand is convex. 3) Firms benefit from regulatory risk exactly when demand is convex. 4) Consumers’ risk preferences tend to contradict the firm’s. 5) Benevolent regulators always prefer regulatory risk and these preferences may contradict both the firm’s and consumers’.

Deterministic versus Stochastic Mechanisms in Principal-Agent Models

This paper shows that, contrary to what is generally believed, decreasing concavity of the agent’s utility function with respect to the screening variable is not sufficient to ensure that stochastic mechanisms are suboptimal. The paper demonstrates, however, that they are suboptimal whenever the optimal deterministic mechanism exhibits no bunching. This is the case for most applications of the theory and therefore validates the literature’s usual focus on deterministic mechanisms.

The Political Economy of Regulatory Risk

I investigate the argument that, in a two–party system with different regulatory objectives, political uncertainty generates regulatory risk. I show that this risk has a fluctuation effect that hurts both parties and an output–expansion effect that benefits one party. Consequently, at least one party dislikes regulatory risk. Moreover, both political parties gain from eliminating regulatory risk when political divergence is small or the winning probability of the regulatory–risk–averse party is not too large. Because of a commitment problem, direct political bargaining is insufficient to eliminate regulatory risk. Politically independent regulatory agencies solve this commitment problem.

Collusion and Renegotiation in a Principal-Supervisor-Agent Relationship

This paper describes a principal-agent relationship with a supervisor who has information about the agent. The agent and the supervisor have the possibility to collude and misinform the principal. In accordance with the existing literature there exists an optimal contract which excludes collusion in equilibrium. The optimal contract exhibits, however, ex-post inefficient and creates scope for renegotiation. If a renegotiation-stage is incorporated in the game then for some parameter constellations the optimal contract is a contract which necessarily induces collusion. The paper thus shows that the principals behavior toward ex-post inefficiencies may determine whether collusion occurs in equilibrium.

Contracting with imperfect commitment and noisy communication

Lecture on the first SFB/TR 15 meeting, Gummersbach, July, 18 - 20, 2004This paper provides an analytical framework for studying principal-agent problems with adverse selection and limited commitment. By allowing the principal to use noisy communication we solve two fundamental problems of contracting with imperfect commitment: First, we identify the relevant incentive constraints by showing that only ‘local’ constraints are binding if the agent’s preferences satisfy a single–crossing property. Second, we show that one can restrict the dimensionality of the message spaces of the communication device to the number of the agent’s types. As we illustrate in an example, these findings allow us to derive the optimal contract by a similar procedure as in contracting problems with full commitment.

Imperfect commitment and the revelation principle: the multi-agent case

Abstract We consider mechanism design problems with n agents when the mechanism designer cannot fully commit to an allocation function. With a single agent (n=1) optimal mechanisms can always be represented by direct mechanisms, under which each agent’s message set is the set of his possible types [Bester, H., Strausz, R., 2000. Contracting with imperfect commitment and the revelation principle: the single agent case. Free University of Berlin, mimeo]. We show that this result does not hold if n≥2. That is, in mechanism design problems with multiple agents the use of direct mechanisms may be suboptimal.

Interim Information in Long Term Contracts

We study how long-term contracts condition on a natural flow of information that reduces asymmetric information over time. If such interim information is verifiable, optimal contracts achieve the first best. Under nonverifiability, the optimal contract depends on the signals accuracy and timing. Introducing signal manipulation as a parameterization of verifiability reveals a trade-off between accuracy and manipulability. Signals that are accurate, received early, or hard to manipulate enable the principal to extract all rents and adjust allocations closer to the first best. Imprecise, late, and manipulable signals affect only future allocations and leave rents to efficient types.

Deterministic mechanisms and the revelation principle

Abstract This note shows: (1) the classical revelation principle does not hold for deterministic mechanisms, (2) with one agent, a revelation principle in terms of payoffs holds, and (3) with more than one agent the result fails and direct mechanisms may by suboptimal.