Agency Problems and Commitment in Delegation Games

在许多经济情况下，代表们被雇来代表他们的校长玩游戏。 委托-代理理论在分析最优契约如何应对委托关系中的各种代理问题（逆向选择、道德风险以及两者的结合）方面取得了很大的成功。 然而，在大多数这类文献中，代理人并不与其他各方进行博弈，相反，他的行为本身决定了委托人的收益，可能是自然的外生随机化。 本研究旨在探讨校长应如何设计授权契约，以提供适当的激励，并在几类授权博弈中获得相对于其他各方的策略优势。 研究结果可能会提供重要的影响，委托代理文学和授权文学。 这项研究还可能揭示真实的生活中合同的有趣特征，如汽车经销商合同中的阻碍，并允许导出某些可能导致承诺效应实证检验的含义。学生沃尔特·康特，是研究一个代表讨价还价的游戏，在这个游戏中，一个不可分割的货物的卖方雇用一个代表（中间人）把货物卖给买方。 我们表明，卖方的战略操纵的委托合同可能会导致谈判失败的代表和买方之间的卖方设定的最低价格超过一些买家的估值。 此外，承诺（通过最低价格）和激励措施之间的相互作用取决于代理问题的性质。 我们想在几个有趣的方向扩展基本模型，并将该模型应用于汽车经销商合同。

In many economic situations delegates are hired to play games on behalf of their principals. The principal-agent literature has had much success in analyzing how optimal contracts should respond to various types of agency problems (adverse selection, moral hazard, and combinations of both) in the delegation relationship. However, the agent in most of this literature does not play a game with other parties, rather, his actions alone determine the principal's payoff subject to perhaps exogenous randomization by nature. The proposed research is a study of how principals should design the delegation contract in order to provide proper incentives for their delegates AND gain strategic advantage against the other parties in several classes of delegation games. The findings will likely provide important ramifications to both the principal-agent literature and the delegation literature. The research may also throw light on interesting features of real life contracts such as holdbacks in car dealer contracts, and allow derivation of certain implications that could lead to empirical tests of the commitment effect.The proposed research, largely joint work with Ph.D. student Walter Cont, is to study a delegate bargaining game in which the seller of an indivisible good hires a delegate (an intermediary) to sell the good to a buyer. We show that the seller's strategic manipulation of the delegation contract may cause bargaining failures between the delegate and the buyer when the seller sets a minimum price exceeding some buyers' valuations. Furthermore, the interaction between commitment (through minimum price) and incentives depends on the nature of the agency problem. We would like to extend the basic model in several interesting directions and apply the model to car dealership contracts.