Wasteful Sanctions, Underperformance, and Endogenous Supervision

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Miller, David A.; Rozen, Kareen
• 署名单位: University of Michigan System; University of Michigan; Yale University; Yale University
• 刊物名称: AMERICAN ECONOMIC JOURNAL-MICROECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1945-7669
• DOI: 10.1257/mic.6.4.326
• 发表日期: 2014
• 页码: 326-361
• 关键词: optimal-contracts; Peer pressure; incentives; partnerships; INFORMATION; EFFICIENCY; memory; COSTS; teams

摘要

We study optimal contracting in team settings where agents have many opportunities to shirk, task-level monitoring is needed to provide useful incentives, and it is difficult to write individual performance into formal contracts. Incentives are provided informally, using wasteful sanctions like guilt and shame, or slowed promotion. These features give rise to optimal contracts with underperformance, forgiving sanctioning schemes, and endogenous supervision structures. Agents optimally take on more assigned tasks than they intend to complete, leading to the concentration of supervisory responsibility in the hands of one or two agents.