IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/red/sed017/1537.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Disentangling Moral Hazard and Adverse Selection

Author

Listed:
  • Hector Chade

    (Arizona State University)

Abstract

This paper analyzes a canonical principal-agent problem with moral hazard and adverse selection. The agent is risk averse and has private information about his disutility of taking an unobservable action. The principal is risk neutral and designs a menu of contracts consisting of a compensation scheme and a recommended action for each type of agent to maximize expected profit. We first derive a set of sufficient conditions for menus to be feasible (i.e., satisfy participation and incentive compatibility). Then we provide a method of solution, decoupling, consisting of first solving a cost minimization problem for a pure moral hazard problem for each type, action, and utility level of the agent, and then using the resulting cost function to solve a suitable adverse selection problem. This relaxed problem is both tractable and delivers a candidate solution for the original problem. We show several classes of primitives under which this candidate solution is in fact feasible and hence optimal. We also describe several properties that optimal menus exhibit when decoupling is valid.

Suggested Citation

  • Hector Chade, 2017. "Disentangling Moral Hazard and Adverse Selection," 2017 Meeting Papers 1537, Society for Economic Dynamics.
    • Handle: RePEc:red:sed017:1537
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://red-files-public.s3.amazonaws.com/meetpapers/2017/paper_1537.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Patrick Bolton & Mathias Dewatripont, 2005. "Contract Theory," MIT Press Books, The MIT Press, edition 1, volume 1, number 0262025760, December.
    2. Marie-Cécile Fagart, 2002. "Wealth Effects, Moral Hazard and Adverse Selection in a Principal-Agent Model," Working Papers 2002-15, Center for Research in Economics and Statistics.
    3. Jewitt, Ian, 1988. "Justifying the First-Order Approach to Principal-Agent Problems," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 56(5), pages 1177-1190, September.
    4. HOLMSTROM, Bengt, 1979. "Moral hazard and observability," LIDAM Reprints CORE 379, Université catholique de Louvain, Center for Operations Research and Econometrics (CORE).
    5. Jewitt, Ian & Kadan, Ohad & Swinkels, Jeroen M., 2008. "Moral hazard with bounded payments," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 143(1), pages 59-82, November.
    6. Paul Milgrom & Ilya Segal, 2002. "Envelope Theorems for Arbitrary Choice Sets," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 70(2), pages 583-601, March.
    7. Moroni, Sofia & Swinkels, Jeroen, 2014. "Existence and non-existence in the moral hazard problem," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 150(C), pages 668-682.
    8. Grossman, Sanford J & Hart, Oliver D, 1983. "An Analysis of the Principal-Agent Problem," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 51(1), pages 7-45, January.
    9. Eric Maskin & John Riley, 1984. "Monopoly with Incomplete Information," RAND Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 15(2), pages 171-196, Summer.
    10. Kadan, Ohad & Swinkels, Jeroen M., 2013. "On the moral hazard problem without the first-order approach," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 148(6), pages 2313-2343.
    11. Guesnerie, Roger & Laffont, Jean-Jacques, 1984. "A complete solution to a class of principal-agent problems with an application to the control of a self-managed firm," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 25(3), pages 329-369, December.
    12. Bengt Holmstrom, 1979. "Moral Hazard and Observability," Bell Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 10(1), pages 74-91, Spring.
    13. Marina Halac & Navin Kartik & Qingmin Liu, 2016. "Optimal Contracts for Experimentation," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 83(3), pages 1040-1091.
    14. Roger B. Myerson, 1981. "Optimal Auction Design," Mathematics of Operations Research, INFORMS, vol. 6(1), pages 58-73, February.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    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. Chade, Hector & Swinkels, Jeroen, 2020. "The moral hazard problem with high stakes," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 187(C).
    2. Jung, Jin Yong, 2022. "Effects of changes in preferences in moral hazard problems," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 205(C).
    3. Chade, Hector & Vera de Serio, Virginia N., 2014. "Wealth effects and agency costs," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 86(C), pages 1-11.
    4. 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.
    5. David Rietzke & Yu Chen, 2020. "Push or pull? Performance‐pay, incentives, and information," RAND Journal of Economics, RAND Corporation, vol. 51(1), pages 301-317, March.
    6. Hugo Hopenhayn & Arantxa Jarque, 2010. "Unobservable Persistent Productivity and Long Term Contracts," Review of Economic Dynamics, Elsevier for the Society for Economic Dynamics, vol. 13(2), pages 333-349, April.
    7. Garrett, Daniel F. & Georgiadis, George & Smolin, Alex & Szentes, Balázs, 2023. "Optimal technology design," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 209(C).
    8. Damien S Eldridge, 2007. "A Shirking Theory of Referrals," Working Papers 2007.05, School of Economics, La Trobe University.
    9. Fosco, C. & Mengel, F., 2008. "Incentives and informal networks," Research Memorandum 022, Maastricht University, Maastricht Research School of Economics of Technology and Organization (METEOR).
    10. Eric S. Chou & Chien-Lung Chen, 2015. "Can Agents Be Better Off with Pay Caps?," Scandinavian Journal of Economics, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 117(4), pages 1069-1090, October.
    11. Alex Edmans & Xavier Gabaix, 2016. "Executive Compensation: A Modern Primer," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 54(4), pages 1232-1287, December.
    12. Alexander, Corinne & Ivanic, Rasto & Rosch, Stephanie & Tyner, Wallace & Wu, Steven Y. & Yoder, Joshua R., 2012. "Contract theory and implications for perennial energy crop contracting," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 34(4), pages 970-979.
    13. Dionne, Georges & Harrington, Scott, 2017. "Insurance and Insurance Markets," Working Papers 17-2, HEC Montreal, Canada Research Chair in Risk Management.
    14. Zou, Liang, 1992. "Threat-based incentive mechanisms under moral hazard and adverse selection," Journal of Comparative Economics, Elsevier, vol. 16(1), pages 47-74, March.
    15. Kirkegaard, René, 2017. "Moral hazard and the spanning condition without the first-order approach," Games and Economic Behavior, Elsevier, vol. 102(C), pages 373-387.
    16. Inés Macho-Stadler & David Pérez-Castrillo, 2018. "Moral hazard: Base models and two extensions," Chapters, in: Luis C. Corchón & Marco A. Marini (ed.), Handbook of Game Theory and Industrial Organization, Volume I, chapter 16, pages 453-485, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    17. Ewerhart, Christian, 2016. "An envelope approach to tournament design," Journal of Mathematical Economics, Elsevier, vol. 63(C), pages 1-9.
    18. Martin Byford, 2003. "Moral Hazard From Costless Hidden Actions," Working Papers 2003.03, School of Economics, La Trobe University.
    19. Bracha Meth, 1996. "Reduction of Outcome Variance: Optimality and Incentives," Contemporary Accounting Research, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 13(1), pages 309-328, March.
    20. X. Ruiz del Portal, 2012. "Conditions for incentive compatibility in models with multidimensional allocation functions and one-dimensional types," Review of Economic Design, Springer;Society for Economic Design, vol. 16(4), pages 311-321, December.

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:red:sed017:1537. 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: Christian Zimmermann (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/sedddea.html .

    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.