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# History: Contract theory

 ACCEPTED7 months agoGhost BhaU33 Name: Contract theoryIn economics, contract theory studies how economic actors can and do construct contractual arrangements, generally in the presence of asymmetric information. Because of its connections with both agency and incentives, contract theory is often categorized within a field known as Law and economics. Such a procedure has been used in the contract theory framework to several typical situations, labeled moral hazard, adverse selection and signalling. The spirit of these models lies in finding theoretical ways to motivate agents to take appropriate actions, even under an insurance contract. The main results achieved through this family of models involve: mathematical properties of the utility structure of the principal and the agent, relaxation of assumptions, and variations of the time structure of the contract relationship, among others. It is customary to model people as maximizers of some von Neumann–Morgenstern utility functions, as stated by expected utility theory.In moral hazard models, the information asymmetry is the principal's inability to observe and/or verify the agent's action. Performance-based contracts that depend on observable and verifiable output can often be employed to create incentives for the agent to act in the principal's interest. When agents are risk-averse, however, such contracts are generally only second-best because incentivization precludes full insurance. The typical moral hazard model is formulated as follows. E− w subject to the agent's "individual rationality (IR)" constraint, ≥u ¯{\displaystyle E\leftu(w(y(e)))-c(e)\right\geq {\bar {u}}}and the agent's "incentive compatibility (IC)" constraint, E[u ( w e{\displaystyle E\leftu(w(y({\hat {e}})))-c({\hat {e}})\right\geq E\leftu(w(y(e)))-c(e)\right\ e{\displaystyle e}.c ( e )u \displaystyle u(\cdot )} is the "utility function", which is concave for the risk-averse agent, is convex for the risk-prone agent, and is linear for the risk-neutral agent. If the agent is risk-neutral and there are no bounds on transfer payments, the fact that the agent's effort is unobservable (i.e., it is a "hidden action") does not pose a problem. Specifically, the principal can give the realized output to the agent, but let the agent make a fixed up-front payment. The agent is then a "residual claimant" and will maximize the expected total surplus minus the fixed payment. Hence, the first-best effort level maximizes the agent's payoff, and the fixed payment can be chosen such that in equilibrium the agent's expected payoff equals his or her reservation utility (which is what the agent would get if no contract was written). Yet, if the agent is risk-averse, there is a trade-off between incentives and insurance. Moreover, if the agent is risk-neutral but wealth-constrained, the agent cannot make the fixed up-front payment to the principal, so the principal must leave a "limited liability rent" to the agent (i.e., the agent earns more than his or her reservation utility). The moral hazard model with risk-neutral but wealth-constrained agents has also been extended to settings with repeated interaction and multiple tasks. While it is difficult to test models with hidden action empirically (since there is no field data on unobservable variables), the premise of contract theory that incentives matter has been successfully tested in the field. Moreover, contract-theoretic models with hidden actions have been directly tested in laboratory experiments.In adverse selection models, the principal is not informed about a certain characteristic of the agent at the time the contract is written. The characteristic is called the agent's "type". In this case, the agent's type is his or her health status, which is privately known by the agent. In this case, the private firm is the agent and the agent's type is the cost level. The principal offers a menu of contracts to the agent; the menu is called "incentive-compatible" if the agent picks the contract that was designed for his or her type. In order to make the agent reveal the true type, the principal has to leave an information rent to the agent (i.e., the agent earns more than his or her reservation utility, which is what the agent would get if no contract was written). Adverse selection theory has been expanded in several directions, e.g. by endogenizing the information structure (so the agent can decide whether or not to gather private information) and by taking into consideration social preferences and bounded rationality.Contract theory also utilizes the notion of a complete contract, which is thought of as a contract that specifies the legal consequences of every possible state of the world. More recent developments known as the theory of incomplete contracts, pioneered by Oliver Hart and his coauthors, study the incentive effects of parties' inability to write complete contingent contracts, e.g. concerning relationship-specific investments. In certain models, such as Michael Spence's job-market model, the agent can signal his type to the principal which may help to resolve the problem.Summary of this Wikipedia page.