This paper studies non-contractibility of a contract designer's actions in an agency model with costly monitoring. It shows that non-contractibility may lead to an explicit randomness, which is not optimal under full contractibility. The randomness mitigates non-contractibility. Its effectiveness increases with the ex post deducibility of the non-contractible variable. Mitigation is perfect, if the non-contractible action can be deduced perfectly from other contractible variables. Consequently, non-contractibility is less severe than some recent literature indicates.
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Paper provided by Departmental Working Papers in its series Papers with number
003.
Find related papers by JEL classification: D82 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Asymmetric and Private Information L23 - Industrial Organization - - Firm Objectives, Organization, and Behavior - - - Organization of Production
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