IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/fosoec/v36y2007i2p87-95.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Reducing Teacher Moral Hazard in the U.S. Elementary and Secondary Educational System through Merit-pay: An Application of the Principal--Agency Theory

Author

Listed:
  • Michael Casson

Abstract

America’s elementary and secondary educational system is faced with an inefficiency stemming from a basic problem associated with unobservability: moral hazard. In this case, the teacher (agent) has an incentive to exert less effort (given cost associated with more work) if the school district (principal) cannot distinguish between low student performance due to a lack of teacher effort and low student performance due low student quality (random variable). This research develops an optimal incentive scheme that guarantees the teacher a fixed payment, plus a variable payment that would be a function of teacher ‘action’ variables thereby reducing moral hazard.

Suggested Citation

  • Michael Casson, 2007. "Reducing Teacher Moral Hazard in the U.S. Elementary and Secondary Educational System through Merit-pay: An Application of the Principal--Agency Theory," Forum for Social Economics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 36(2), pages 87-95, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:taf:fosoec:v:36:y:2007:i:2:p:87-95
    DOI: 10.1007/s12143-007-9004-3
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s12143-007-9004-3
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1007/s12143-007-9004-3?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

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

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Jean Tirole, 1988. "The Theory of Industrial Organization," MIT Press Books, The MIT Press, edition 1, volume 1, number 0262200716, December.
    2. Ross, Stephen A, 1973. "The Economic Theory of Agency: The Principal's Problem," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 63(2), pages 134-139, May.
    3. Dale Ballou, 1996. "Do Public Schools Hire the Best Applicants?," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 111(1), pages 97-133.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Rosemary Walker & Liviu Florea, 2014. "Easy-Come-Easy-Go: Moral Hazard in the Context of Return to Education," Journal of Business Ethics, Springer, vol. 120(2), pages 201-217, March.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Rafel Crespí–Cladera & Carles Gispert, 2003. "Total Board Compensation, Governance and Performance of Spanish Listed Companies," LABOUR, CEIS, vol. 17(1), pages 103-126, March.
    2. Cheng-Zhong Qin & Shuzhong Shi & Guofu Tan, 2015. "Nash bargaining for log-convex problems," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 58(3), pages 413-440, April.
    3. Dye, Ronald A. & Sridharan, Sri S., 2014. "Agency conflicts in the presence of random private benefits from project implementation," Economics Letters, Elsevier, vol. 123(3), pages 308-312.
    4. Rodolfo Apreda, 2001. "The Brokerage of Asymmetric Information," CEMA Working Papers: Serie Documentos de Trabajo. 190, Universidad del CEMA.
    5. Michael Casson, 2007. "Reducing Teacher Moral Hazard in the U.S. Elementary and Secondary Educational System through Merit-pay: An Application of the Principal–Agency Theory," Forum for Social Economics, Springer;The Association for Social Economics, vol. 36(2), pages 87-95, October.
    6. Ganesh Iyer & Dmitri Kuksov, 2010. "Consumer Feelings and Equilibrium Product Quality," Journal of Economics & Management Strategy, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 19(1), pages 137-168, March.
    7. Latha Shanker & Ahmet Satir, 2021. "Managing foreign exchange risk with buyer–supplier contracts," Annals of Operations Research, Springer, vol. 299(1), pages 1001-1024, April.
    8. Dobeli, Barbara & Vanini, Paolo, 2004. "An analysis of IMF-induced moral hazard," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 28(12), pages 2933-2956, December.
    9. Jean‐Jacques Laffont, 1989. "A Brief Overview of the Economics of Incomplete Markets," The Economic Record, The Economic Society of Australia, vol. 65(1), pages 54-65, March.
    10. Oscar Gutiérrez & Francisco Ruiz-Aliseda, 2011. "Real options with unknown-date events," Annals of Finance, Springer, vol. 7(2), pages 171-198, May.
    11. E. Villemeur & Helmuth Cremer & Bernard Roy & Joëlle Toledano, 2007. "Worksharing, access and bypass: the structure of prices in the postal sector," Journal of Regulatory Economics, Springer, vol. 32(1), pages 67-85, August.
    12. Jianqiang Zhang & Weijun Zhong & Shue Mei, 2012. "Competitive effects of informative advertising in distribution channels," Marketing Letters, Springer, vol. 23(3), pages 561-584, September.
    13. Donna, Javier D. & Pereira, Pedro & Trindade, Andre & Yoshida, Renan C., 2020. "Direct-to-Consumer Sales by Manufacturers and Bargaining," MPRA Paper 105773, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    14. Francisco B. Galarza & Gabriella Wong, 2017. "The Impact of Price Information on Consumer Behavior: An Experiment," Working Papers 106, Peruvian Economic Association.
    15. Kaplow, Louis & Shapiro, Carl, 2007. "Antitrust," Handbook of Law and Economics, in: A. Mitchell Polinsky & Steven Shavell (ed.), Handbook of Law and Economics, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 15, pages 1073-1225, Elsevier.
    16. Kessing, Sebastian G. & Konrad, Kai A. & Kotsogiannis, Christos, 2006. "Federal tax autonomy and the limits of cooperation," Journal of Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 59(2), pages 317-329, March.
    17. Etienne Billette de Villemeur & Kevin Guittet, 2004. "Optimal structure of air transport services when environnemental costs are taken into account," Post-Print hal-01022242, HAL.
    18. Aurora García‐Gallego & Nikolaos Georgantzís, 2009. "Market Effects of Changes in Consumers' Social Responsibility," Journal of Economics & Management Strategy, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 18(1), pages 235-262, March.
    19. Simon P. Anderson & Régis Renault, 2011. "Price Discrimination," Chapters, in: André de Palma & Robin Lindsey & Emile Quinet & Roger Vickerman (ed.), A Handbook of Transport Economics, chapter 22, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    20. Leonard J. Mirman & Egas M. Salgueiro & Marc Santugini, 2013. "Integrating Real and Financial Decisions of the Firm," Cahiers de recherche 1333, CIRPEE.

    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:taf:fosoec:v:36:y:2007:i:2:p:87-95. 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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/RFSE20 .

    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.