IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/xrs/sfbmaa/00-29.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Optimal Delegation

Author

Listed:
  • Szalay, Dezsö

    (Sonderforschungsbereich 504)

Abstract

How should a principal delegate a task to an agent? This paper studies the principal's choice of an agent's freedom of action as an incentive problem. The optimal contract simultaneously copes with two problems of asymmetric information: the agent must be motivated to acquire productive information and he must be given incentives to use the information in the principal's interest. In order to provide the agent with proper incentives for information acquisition the principal may optimally choose to curtail the agent's authority over decision making even if there are no conflicts with respect to the decision itself. As a result the relationship between the severity of the conflict of principal's and agent's interests and the agent's optimal freedom of action is non-monotonic. Our theory provides a rationale for commonly observed phenomena such as 'demanding clear statements' from advisors or 'imposing an innovation bias' on an organizational structure.

Suggested Citation

  • Szalay, Dezsö, 2000. "Optimal Delegation," Sonderforschungsbereich 504 Publications 00-29, Sonderforschungsbereich 504, Universität Mannheim;Sonderforschungsbereich 504, University of Mannheim.
    • Handle: RePEc:xrs:sfbmaa:00-29
    Note: Special thanks are due to Martin Hellwig for ongoing discussions and advice. I would also like to thank Jacques Crémer, Sascha Haller, Nobuhiro Kiyotaki, Christian Laux, Nicolas Melissas, Benny Moldovanu and John Moore as well as the participants of the Mannheim workshop in economic theory for very useful discussions and comments. Financial support of the Swiss Science National Foundation is greatfully acknowledged. All remaining errors are my own.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Jean Tirole, 1999. "Incomplete Contracts: Where Do We Stand?," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 67(4), pages 741-782, July.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Krähmer, Daniel, 2002. "Delegation versus authority [Delegation versus Autorität]," Discussion Papers, Research Unit: Market Processes and Governance FS IV 02-26, WZB Berlin Social Science Center.
    2. Andreas Roider, 2006. "Delegation of Authority as an Optimal (In)Complete Contract," Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics (JITE), Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen, vol. 162(3), pages 391-411, September.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Stephanie Rosenkranz & Patrick W. Schmitz, 2007. "Can Coasean Bargaining Justify Pigouvian Taxation?," Economica, London School of Economics and Political Science, vol. 74(296), pages 573-585, November.
    2. Giuseppe Dari-Mattiacci & Bruno Deffains, 2007. "Uncertainty of Law and the Legal Process," Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics (JITE), Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen, vol. 163(4), pages 627-656, December.
    3. Michiel Bijlsma & Wouter Elsenburg & Michiel van Leuvensteijn, 2010. "Four Futures for Finance; A scenario study," CPB Document 211.rdf, CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis.
    4. Nabil I. Al-Najjar & Luca Anderlini & Leonardo Felli, 2006. "Undescribable Events," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 73(4), pages 849-868.
    5. Sharon Novak & Scott Stern, 2009. "Complementarity Among Vertical Integration Decisions: Evidence from Automobile Product Development," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 55(2), pages 311-332, February.
    6. Goergen, Marc & Manjon, Miguel C. & Renneboog, Luc, 2008. "Recent developments in German corporate governance," International Review of Law and Economics, Elsevier, vol. 28(3), pages 175-193, September.
    7. B. Boockmann & Paul Thurner, 2006. "Flexibility provisions in multilateral environmental treaties," International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics, Springer, vol. 6(2), pages 113-135, June.
    8. Elisabetta Iossa & David Martimort, 2012. "Risk allocation and the costs and benefits of public--private partnerships," RAND Journal of Economics, RAND Corporation, vol. 43(3), pages 442-474, September.
    9. W. Bentley MacLeod, 1997. "Complexity, Contract and the Employment Relationship," Boston College Working Papers in Economics 342., Boston College Department of Economics.
    10. Patrick W. Schmitz, 2005. "Allocating Control in Agency Problems with Limited Liability and Sequential Hidden Actions," RAND Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 36(2), pages 318-336, Summer.
    11. Patrick W. Schmitz, 2006. "Information Gathering, Transaction Costs, and the Property Rights Approach," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 96(1), pages 422-434, March.
    12. Cremer, Jacques & Khalil, Fahad, 1992. "Gathering Information before Signing a Contract," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 82(3), pages 566-578, June.
    13. Rossi, Enrico, 2020. "Reconsidering the dual nature of property rights: personal property and capital in the law and economics of property rights," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 105840, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    14. Schmitz, Patrick W., 2008. "Information gathering and the hold-up problem in a complete contracting framework," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 101(3), pages 268-271, December.
    15. Trevon D. Logan & Manisha Shah, 2013. "Face Value: Information and Signaling in an Illegal Market," Southern Economic Journal, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 79(3), pages 529-564, January.
    16. Richter, Alexander, 2010. "Industrielle Produkt-Service-Systeme: Eine vertragstheoretische Analyse," Arbeitsberichte des Lehrstuhls für Produktionswirtschaft 9, Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB), Lehrstuhl für Produktionswirtschaft.
    17. Alan Schwartz, 2004. "The Law and Economics of Costly Contracting," The Journal of Law, Economics, and Organization, Oxford University Press, vol. 20(1), pages 2-31, April.
    18. Rosenkranz, Stephanie & Schmitz, Patrick W., 2003. "Optimal allocation of ownership rights in dynamic R&D alliances," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 43(1), pages 153-173, April.
    19. Schmitz, Patrick W., 2000. "Book Review of “Inflation and the Enforcement of Contracts” (Renner, 1999)," MPRA Paper 6971, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    20. Bickenbach, Frank, 2000. "Regulation of Europe's network industries: the perspective of the new economic theory of federalism," Kiel Working Papers 977, Kiel Institute for the World Economy (IfW Kiel).

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:xrs:sfbmaa:00-29. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Carsten Schmidt (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/sfmande.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.