题  目：Labor Tournaments versus (individual) Contracts under Asymmetric Information

报告人：王哲伟    山东大学

主持人：叶  兵    浙江大学经济学院

时  间：2013年6月7日   星期五   15:00-17:00

地  点：浙大玉泉校区外经贸大楼418室

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Abstract: This paper compares (basic-contract-based) labor tournaments with (individual) contracts in a model with one risk-neutral principal and two risk-neutral agents. We assume that an agents' type (either efficient or inefficient), which is private information before contracting, will eventually be observed by each other after entering the tournament. This is true in many real-world situations where long-term labor contacts are signed ex ante and labor tournaments reward agents ex post. We show that in an efficient tournament scheme that consists of a uniform basic contract and a tournament, the first-best effort levels are always achieved. Further, we provide necessary and sufficient conditions under which the efficient tournament scheme generates more profit for the principal than the optimal contract scheme does, and give examples showing this is the case in many situations with commonly-used concave value functions of the principal. Finally, we show that an optimal tournament scheme, which is no longer (first-best) efficient, always outperforms the efficient tournament scheme from the principal's perspective. A number of papers (e.g., Lazear and Rosen 1981; Green and Stokey 1983; Nalebuff and Stiglitz 1983; Mookherjee 1984) show that tournaments may outperform contracts when common performance shock is large. This paper provides another rationale for the use of tournaments in the presence of asymmetric information