Incomplete incentive contracts in complex task environments: an agent-based simulation with minimal intelligence agents

Incentive contracts often do not govern all task elements for which an employee is responsible. Prior research, particularly in the tradition of principal-agent theory, has studied incomplete incentive contracts as multi-task problems focusing on how to motivate the employee to incur effort for a not-contracted task element. Thus, emphasis is on the “vertical” relation between superior and subordinate, where both are modeled as gifted economic actors. This paper takes another perspective focusing on the “horizontal” interferences of—contracted and not-contracted—task elements across various employees in an organization and, hence, on the complexity of an organization’s task environment. In order to disentangle the interactions among tasks from agents’ behavior, the paper pursues a minimal intelligence approach. An agent-based simulation model based on the framework of NK fitness landscapes is employed. In the simulation experiments, artificial organizations search for superior performance, and the experiments control for the complexity of the task environment and the level of contractual incompleteness. The results suggest that the complexity of the task environment in terms of interactions among task elements may considerably shape the effects of incomplete incentive contracts. In particular, the results indicate that moderate incompleteness of incentive contracts may be beneficial with respect to organizational performance when intra-organizational complexity is high. This is caused by stabilization of search resulting from incomplete contracts. Moreover, interactions may induce that the not-contracted task elements could serve as means objectives, i.e., contributing to achieving contracted task elements.