Agency Problems and Commitment in Delegation Games

在许多经济情况下，代表被雇来代表他们的委托人玩游戏。委托代理文献在分析最优契约应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组合)方面取得了很大成功。然而，在大多数文献中，代理人并不与其他各方博弈，相反，他的行为本身决定了委托人的收益，可能受到本质上的外生随机性的影响。本研究旨在研究委托人应如何设计委派契约，以便为委托人提供适当的激励，并在几类委派博弈中获得相对于其他各方的战略优势。这一发现可能会对委托-代理文献和委托文献都提供重要的影响。这项研究还可能揭示现实生活中合同的有趣特征，如汽车经销商合同中的阻碍，并允许推导出某些可能导致对承诺效果进行实证测试的含义。拟议的研究主要是与博士生沃尔特·孔特合作，研究一种委托讨价还价游戏，在这种博弈中，不可分割的商品的卖家聘请一名代理人(中间人)将商品出售给买家。我们发现，当卖方设定的最低价格超过某些买方的估价时，卖方对委托合同的策略性操纵可能会导致代表和买方之间的讨价还价失败。此外，承诺(通过最低价格)和激励之间的相互作用取决于代理问题的性质。我们希望在几个有趣的方向上扩展基本模型，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.