Information design in the principal-agent problem

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Babichenko, Yakov; Talgam-Cohen, Inbal; Xu, Haifeng; Zabarnyi, Konstantin
• 署名单位: Technion Israel Institute of Technology; Tel Aviv University; University of Chicago; Yale University
• 刊物名称: GAMES AND ECONOMIC BEHAVIOR
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0899-8256
• DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2025.10.003
• 发表日期: 2026
• 关键词: Moral hazard; 1st-order approach; adverse selection; limited-liability; incentives; CONTRACTS; MODEL

摘要

We study a variant of the principal-agent problem in which the principal does not directly observe the agent's effort outcome; rather, she gets a signal about the agent's action according to a variable information structure designed by a regulator. We consider both the case of a risk-neutral and of a risk-averse agent, focusing mainly on a setting with a limited liability assumption. We provide a clean characterization for implementability of actions and utility profiles by any information structure, which turns out to be simple thresholds on the utilities. We further study naturally-constrained information structures in which the signal emitted from any action is either the action itself or some actions nearby. We show that the worst implementable welfare deteriorates gracefully as the information structure becomes noisier. In a more general class of signaling constraints, we prove that deciding whether a certain action is implementable is NP-complete.