IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/rje/randje/v15y1984iwinterp578-581.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The Moral Hazard of Budget-Breaking

Author

Listed:
  • Mukesh Eswaran
  • Ashok Kotwal

Abstract

It has recently been suggested in the agency literature that moral hazard in teams can be dealt with by introducing a third party who breaks the budget-balancing constraint, and that this facilitates the design of contracts that can sustain the Pareto optimum as a (perfect) Nash equilibrium. This note offers an explanation for why the use of budget-breaking schemes is not so widespread as that of active monitoring, despite the fact that such schemes would save the resources expended on supervision. The note demonstrates that allowing the budget to be broken introduces the potential for moral hazard on the part of the third party, which could render the proposed equilibrium incredible.

Suggested Citation

  • Mukesh Eswaran & Ashok Kotwal, 1984. "The Moral Hazard of Budget-Breaking," RAND Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 15(4), pages 578-581, Winter.
    • Handle: RePEc:rje:randje:v:15:y:1984:i:winter:p:578-581
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0741-6261%28198424%2915%3A4%3C578%3ATMHOB%3E2.0.CO%3B2-D&origin=repec
    File Function: full text
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to JSTOR subscribers. See http://www.jstor.org for details.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:rje:randje:v:15:y:1984:i:winter:p:578-581. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.rje.org .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.