In a repeated partnership game with imperfect monitoring, we distinguish among the effects of (1) shortening the period over which actions are held fixed, (2) increasing the frequency with which accumulated information is reported, and (3) reducing the amount of discounting of payoffs between successive periods. While reducing the amount of discounting generally improves incentives for cooperation, the other two changes can have the reverse effect. When the game is specified in the customary way with information reported at the end of each period of fixed action, the net effect of shortening the period length can be to destroy all incentives for cooperation, reversing the usual conclusion associated with the Folk Theorem for repeated games. Moreover, when interest rates are low, reducing the frequency of information reporting can greatly enhance the efficiency of equilibrium.
JEL Classification: 026
Keywords: Monitoring, Repeated games, Partnership, Incentives, Folk theorems
Our purpose in this paper is to investigate the economics of managerial organizations by focusing on the decision problem of management. Ours is a “team theory” analysis, that is, it ignores the problem of conflicting objectives among managers and focuses instead on the problem of coordinating the decisions of several imperfectly informed actors. However, unlike classical team theory, we concentrate on the choice by managers of what to know, as well as what to do, and we allow the possibility that bounded rationality limits the managers’ ability to understand subtle messages.
One of the main findings of the principal-agent literature has been that incentive schemes should be sensitive to all information that bears on the agent’s actions. As a manifestation of this principle, incentive schemes tend to take quite complex (non-linear) forms. In contrast, real world schemes are often based on aggregate information with a rather simple structure.
This paper considers the optimality of linear schemes that use only aggregated information. The hypothesis is that linear schemes are to be expected in situations where the agent has a rich set of actions to choose from, because richness in action choice allows the agent to circumvent highly nonlinear schemes. We show that optimal compensation schemes are indeed linear functions of appropriate accounting aggregates in a multi-period model where the agent can observe and respond to his own performance over time. Furthermore, when profits evolve according to a controlled Brownian motion (with the agent at the controls) the optimal compensation scheme is linear in profits. The optimal scheme can be computer as if the principal could only choose among linear rules in a corresponding static problem. Applications of this ad hoc principle appear quite promising and are briefly illustrated.
JEL Classification: 025
Keywords: Intertemporal incentives, Linear incentive schemes