The authors examine the incentives which competing principals give their agents, focusing on two oligopoly models where owners write incentive contracts with the ir managers. Under Cournot quantity competition, each manager's margi nal payment for production will exceed the firm's marginal profit. De viations from profit maximization are reduced by ex ante uncertainty about costs and increased by ex ante correlation between the firms' c osts. In contrast, in a differentiated goods market with price compet ition, managers receive less than their marginal profit. In general, a principal will distort his agent's incentives when the agent compet es with agents of competing principals. Copyright 1987 by American Economic Association.
Download Info
To download:
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the
proper application to
view it first. Information about this may be contained
in the File-Format links below. In case of further problems read
the IDEAS help
file. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS
site. Please be patient as the files may be large.
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to look for a different version under "Related research" (further below) or search for a different version of it.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its listing, contact: (Christopher F. Baum).
Related research
Keywords:
Other versions of this item:
Cited by: (explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.) This item has more than 25 citations. To prevent cluttering this page, these citations are listed on a separate page.