IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/arx/papers/1406.5852.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Moral Hazard in Dynamic Risk Management

Author

Listed:
  • Jakv{s}a Cvitani'c
  • Dylan Possamai
  • Nizar Touzi

Abstract

We consider a contracting problem in which a principal hires an agent to manage a risky project. When the agent chooses volatility components of the output process and the principal observes the output continuously, the principal can compute the quadratic variation of the output, but not the individual components. This leads to moral hazard with respect to the risk choices of the agent. We identify a family of admissible contracts for which the optimal agent's action is explicitly characterized, and, using the recent theory of singular changes of measures for It\^o processes, we study how restrictive this family is. In particular, in the special case of the standard Homlstr\"om-Milgrom model with fixed volatility, the family includes all possible contracts. We solve the principal-agent problem in the case of CARA preferences, and show that the optimal contract is linear in these factors: the contractible sources of risk, including the output, the quadratic variation of the output and the cross-variations between the output and the contractible risk sources. Thus, like sample Sharpe ratios used in practice, path-dependent contracts naturally arise when there is moral hazard with respect to risk management. In a numerical example, we show that the loss of efficiency can be significant if the principal does not use the quadratic variation component of the optimal contract.

Suggested Citation

  • Jakv{s}a Cvitani'c & Dylan Possamai & Nizar Touzi, 2014. "Moral Hazard in Dynamic Risk Management," Papers 1406.5852, arXiv.org, revised Mar 2015.
    • Handle: RePEc:arx:papers:1406.5852
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1406.5852
    File Function: Latest version
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Nutz, Marcel & van Handel, Ramon, 2013. "Constructing sublinear expectations on path space," Stochastic Processes and their Applications, Elsevier, vol. 123(8), pages 3100-3121.
    2. Marcel Nutz & H. Mete Soner, 2010. "Superhedging and Dynamic Risk Measures under Volatility Uncertainty," Papers 1011.2958, arXiv.org, revised Jun 2012.
    3. Jakša Cvitanić & Xuhu Wan & Huali Yang, 2013. "Dynamics of Contract Design with Screening," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 59(5), pages 1229-1244, May.
    4. Yuliy Sannikov, 2008. "A Continuous-Time Version of the Principal-Agent Problem," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 75(3), pages 957-984.
    5. Neufeld, Ariel & Nutz, Marcel, 2014. "Measurability of semimartingale characteristics with respect to the probability law," Stochastic Processes and their Applications, Elsevier, vol. 124(11), pages 3819-3845.
    6. Holmstrom, Bengt & Milgrom, Paul, 1987. "Aggregation and Linearity in the Provision of Intertemporal Incentives," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 55(2), pages 303-328, March.
    7. Lioui, Abraham & Poncet, Patrice, 2013. "Optimal benchmarking for active portfolio managers," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 226(2), pages 268-276.
    8. Cadenillas, Abel & Cvitanic, Jaksa & Zapatero, Fernando, 2007. "Optimal risk-sharing with effort and project choice," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 133(1), pages 403-440, March.
    9. Marcel Nutz & Ramon van Handel, 2012. "Constructing Sublinear Expectations on Path Space," Papers 1205.2415, arXiv.org, revised Apr 2013.
    10. Dylan Possamai & Guillaume Royer & Nizar Touzi, 2013. "On the Robust superhedging of measurable claims," Papers 1302.1850, arXiv.org, revised Feb 2013.
    11. Jaeyoung Sung, 1995. "Linearity with Project Selection and Controllable Diffusion Rate in Continuous-Time Principal-Agent Problems," RAND Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 26(4), pages 720-743, Winter.
    12. Hui Ou-Yang, 2003. "Optimal Contracts in a Continuous-Time Delegated Portfolio Management Problem," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 16(1), pages 173-208.
    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. Julio Backhoff & Ulrich Horst, 2014. "Conditional Analysis and a Principal-Agent problem," Papers 1412.4698, arXiv.org, revised Jun 2016.

    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. Jakša Cvitanić & Dylan Possamaï & Nizar Touzi, 2017. "Moral Hazard in Dynamic Risk Management," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 63(10), pages 3328-3346, October.
    2. Thibaut Mastrolia & Dylan Possamai, 2015. "Moral hazard under ambiguity," Papers 1511.03616, arXiv.org, revised Oct 2016.
    3. Thibaut Mastrolia & Dylan Possamaï, 2018. "Moral Hazard Under Ambiguity," Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications, Springer, vol. 179(2), pages 452-500, November.
    4. Emma Hubert, 2023. "Continuous-time incentives in hierarchies," Finance and Stochastics, Springer, vol. 27(3), pages 605-661, July.
    5. Emma Hubert, 2020. "Continuous-time incentives in hierarchies," Papers 2007.10758, arXiv.org.
    6. Jakša Cvitanić & Dylan Possamaï & Nizar Touzi, 2018. "Dynamic programming approach to principal–agent problems," Finance and Stochastics, Springer, vol. 22(1), pages 1-37, January.
    7. Jaeyoung Sung, 2022. "Optimal contracting under mean-volatility joint ambiguity uncertainties," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 74(2), pages 593-642, September.
    8. Nutz, Marcel, 2015. "Robust superhedging with jumps and diffusion," Stochastic Processes and their Applications, Elsevier, vol. 125(12), pages 4543-4555.
    9. Cvitanić, Jakša & Xing, Hao, 2018. "Asset pricing under optimal contracts," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 173(C), pages 142-180.
    10. Han, Jinhui & Ma, Guiyuan & Yam, Sheung Chi Phillip, 2022. "Relative performance evaluation for dynamic contracts in a large competitive market," European Journal of Operational Research, Elsevier, vol. 302(2), pages 768-780.
    11. Francesca Biagini & Yinglin Zhang, 2017. "Reduced-form framework under model uncertainty," Papers 1707.04475, arXiv.org, revised Mar 2018.
    12. Dylan Possamai & Xiaolu Tan & Chao Zhou, 2015. "Stochastic control for a class of nonlinear kernels and applications," Papers 1510.08439, arXiv.org, revised Jul 2017.
    13. Romuald Élie & Emma Hubert & Thibaut Mastrolia & Dylan Possamaï, 2021. "Mean–field moral hazard for optimal energy demand response management," Mathematical Finance, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 31(1), pages 399-473, January.
    14. Nadide Banu Olcay, 2016. "Dynamic incentive contracts with termination threats," Review of Economic Design, Springer;Society for Economic Design, vol. 20(4), pages 255-288, December.
    15. Alex Edmans & Xavier Gabaix, 2011. "Tractability in Incentive Contracting," The Review of Financial Studies, Society for Financial Studies, vol. 24(9), pages 2865-2894.
    16. Romuald Elie & Emma Hubert & Thibaut Mastrolia & Dylan Possamai, 2019. "Mean-field moral hazard for optimal energy demand response management," Papers 1902.10405, arXiv.org, revised Mar 2020.
    17. Bastien Baldacci & Dylan Possamaï, 2022. "Governmental incentives for green bonds investment," Mathematics and Financial Economics, Springer, volume 16, number 5, June.
    18. Francesca Biagini & Katharina Oberpriller, 2020. "Reduced-form setting under model uncertainty with non-linear affine processes," Papers 2006.14307, arXiv.org, revised Jun 2020.
    19. Romuald Elie & Dylan Possamai, 2016. "Contracting theory with competitive interacting agents," Papers 1605.08099, arXiv.org.
    20. Jiajia Chang & Zhijun Hu & Hui Yang, 2020. "Venture Capital Contracting with Ambiguity Sharing and Effort Complementarity Effect," Mathematics, MDPI, vol. 8(1), pages 1-16, January.

    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:arx:papers:1406.5852. 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: arXiv administrators (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://arxiv.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.