Behavioral Economic Theory on Wage Schemes

我们研究薪酬方案时，把重点放在了一个突出的行为元素--损失厌恶上。我们主要进行了两方面的研究。(1)研究了多智能体道德风险模型，其中智能体具有基于期望的参考依赖偏好。我们证明了团队激励的最优性。由于代理人是损失厌恶的，他们对工资不确定性具有一阶风险厌恶。当他们自己的失败通过其他代理的表现随机得到补偿时，这会导致代理更加努力地工作。在最优合同中，如果大多数代理完成了他们的项目，那么高绩效代理和低绩效代理都会得到同等的奖励，否则只有高绩效代理才会得到奖励。(2)分析了一个任务分配模型，在该模型中，委托人根据未来状态将任务分配给两个代理中的一个。如果代理人具有凹效用，则委托人根据状态将任务分配给每个代理人。相反，如果代理人是损失厌恶的，我们证明了状态独立的分配-将任务分配给所有状态下的单个代理人-即使当委托人可以免费签订或有合同时也是最优的。

We study compensation schemes as focusing on a prominent behavioral element, loss aversion. We mainly conduct two research. (1) We investigate a multi-agent moral-hazard model where agents have expectation-based reference dependent-preferences. We show the optimality of team incentives. Because the agents are loss averse, they have first-order risk aversion to wage uncertainty. This causes the agents to work harder when their own failure is stochastically compensated through other agents’ performance. In the optimal contract, both high- and low-performance agents are equally rewarded if most agents accomplish their projects; otherwise only high-performance agents are rewarded. (2) We analyze a task-assignment model in which a principal assigns a task to one of two agents depending on future states. If the agents have concave utility, the principal assigns the task to each of them contingent on the state. In contrast, if the agents are loss averse, we show that a state-independent assignment-assigning the task to a single agent in all states-can be optimal even when the principal can write a contingent contract at no cost.