(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)"> (This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)">
[go: up one dir, main page]
More Web Proxy on the site http://driver.im/
IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ucb/calbwp/91-172.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Game-Playing Agents: Unobservable Contracts as Precommitments

Author

Listed:
  • Michael L. Katz.
Abstract
The players in most economically important games are agents, not principals. This raises the possibility of the principal's setting a strategic compensation scheme. The central question addressed here is whether unobservable agency contracts can serve as precommitments. I argue that, in terms of Nash equilibrium outcomes, the answer is no when it is common knowledge that there exists a contract that "solves" the standard agency problems and that the principal and agent have the same preferences over income and effort. However, I also show that when these conditions are not satisfied (as they typically will not be), provisions of the agency contract enacted solely to deal with incentive and risk sharing problems of the agency relationship may have the secondary effect of credibly precommitting the agent in the game he plays with other agents. I also briefly consider the effects of contract renegotiation.
(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Suggested Citation

  • Michael L. Katz., 1991. "Game-Playing Agents: Unobservable Contracts as Precommitments," Economics Working Papers 91-172, University of California at Berkeley.
    • Handle: RePEc:ucb:calbwp:91-172
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ucb:calbwp:91-172. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Christopher F. Baum (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/debrkus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.