论文标题
道德危害和不利选择下的合同
Contracts under Moral Hazard and Adverse Selection
论文作者
论文摘要
在经典的主要代理问题中,委托人必须设计合同,以激励代理代表委托人执行诉讼。我们在代理可以是几种类型之一的环境中研究经典的主要代理问题(影响他们可能采取的行动的结果)。这结合了“道德危害”(有关动作的不完整信息)的合同理论现象与“不利选择”(有关类型的不完整信息)的现象。 我们通过计算镜头检查了这个问题。我们表明,在这种情况下,计算利润最大化的单一合约或合同的利润最大化菜单是APX-HARD(而不是在没有类型的情况下,可以有效地计算最佳合同)。然后,我们表明,最佳线性合同量表的性能在类型的数量中尤其好:如果代理具有$ n $可用操作和$ t $可能的类型,则最佳线性合同可以实现$ O(n \ log t)$最佳利润的近似值。最后,我们应用框架来证明主体机制的各种基准之间的严重最差近似范围。
In the classical principal-agent problem, a principal must design a contract to incentivize an agent to perform an action on behalf of the principal. We study the classical principal-agent problem in a setting where the agent can be of one of several types (affecting the outcome of actions they might take). This combines the contract theory phenomena of "moral hazard" (incomplete information about actions) with that of "adverse selection" (incomplete information about types). We examine this problem through the computational lens. We show that in this setting it is APX-hard to compute either the profit-maximizing single contract or the profit-maximizing menu of contracts (as opposed to in the absence of types, where one can efficiently compute the optimal contract). We then show that the performance of the best linear contract scales especially well in the number of types: if agent has $n$ available actions and $T$ possible types, the best linear contract achieves an $O(n\log T)$ approximation of the best possible profit. Finally, we apply our framework to prove tight worst-case approximation bounds between a variety of benchmarks of mechanisms for the principal.