Delegating Multiple Decisions

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Frankel, Alex
• 署名单位: University of Chicago
• 刊物名称: AMERICAN ECONOMIC JOURNAL-MICROECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1945-7669
• DOI: 10.1257/mic.20130270
• 发表日期: 2016
• 页码: 16-53
• 关键词: Cheap talk; transfers; COMMUNICATION; INFORMATION; COMMITMENT; mechanism; settings; CHOICE; DESIGN; POLICY

摘要

This paper shows how to extend the heuristic of capping an agent against her bias to delegation problems over multiple decisions. Caps may be exactly optimal when the agent has constant biases, in which case a cap corresponds to a ceiling on the weighted average of actions. More generally caps give approximately first-best payoffs when there are many independent decisions. The shape of the cap translates into economic intuition on how to let an agent trade off increases on one action for decreases on other actions. I discuss applications to political delegation, capital investments, monopoly price regulation, and tariff policy.