Business activities often involve a common agent managing a variety of projects on behalf of investors with potentially conflicting interests. The extent of the agent's actions is also often unknown to investors, who have to design contracts that provide incentives to the manager despite this lack of crucial knowledge. We consider a game between several principals and a common agent, where principals know only a subset of the actions available to the agent. Principals demand robustness and evaluate contracts on a worst‐case basis. This robust approach allows for a crisp characterization of the equilibrium contracts and payoffs and provides a novel proof of equilibrium existence in common agency by constructing a pseudo‐potential for the game. Robust contracts make explicit how the efficiency of the equilibrium outcome relative to collusion among principals depends on the principals' ability to extract payments from the agent.
{"title":"Robust contracts in common agency","authors":"Keler Marku, Sergio Ocampo, Jean-Baptiste Tondji","doi":"10.1111/1756-2171.12463","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1756-2171.12463","url":null,"abstract":"Business activities often involve a common agent managing a variety of projects on behalf of investors with potentially conflicting interests. The extent of the agent's actions is also often unknown to investors, who have to design contracts that provide incentives to the manager despite this lack of crucial knowledge. We consider a game between several principals and a common agent, where principals know only a subset of the actions available to the agent. Principals demand robustness and evaluate contracts on a worst‐case basis. This robust approach allows for a crisp characterization of the equilibrium contracts and payoffs and provides a novel proof of equilibrium existence in common agency by constructing a pseudo‐potential for the game. Robust contracts make explicit how the efficiency of the equilibrium outcome relative to collusion among principals depends on the principals' ability to extract payments from the agent.","PeriodicalId":517123,"journal":{"name":"The RAND Journal of Economics","volume":"10 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141122515","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
A multi‐product monopolist sells sequentially to a buyer who privately learns his valuations. Using big data, the monopolist learns the intertemporal correlation of the buyer's valuations. Perfect price discrimination is generally unattainable—even when the seller learns the correlation perfectly, has full commitment, and in the limit where the consumption good about which the buyer has ex ante private information becomes insignificant. This impossibility is due to informational externalities that require information rents for the buyer's later consumption. These rents induce upward and downward distortions, violating the generalized no distortion at the top principle of dynamic mechanism design.
{"title":"Correlation‐savvy sellers","authors":"Roland Strausz","doi":"10.1111/1756-2171.12465","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1756-2171.12465","url":null,"abstract":"A multi‐product monopolist sells sequentially to a buyer who privately learns his valuations. Using big data, the monopolist learns the intertemporal correlation of the buyer's valuations. Perfect price discrimination is generally unattainable—even when the seller learns the correlation perfectly, has full commitment, and in the limit where the consumption good about which the buyer has ex ante private information becomes insignificant. This impossibility is due to informational externalities that require information rents for the buyer's later consumption. These rents induce upward and downward distortions, violating the generalized no distortion at the top principle of dynamic mechanism design.","PeriodicalId":517123,"journal":{"name":"The RAND Journal of Economics","volume":" 7","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140998660","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Jesse Buchsbaum, Catherine Hausman, Johanna L Mathieu, Jing Peng
In electricity markets, generators are rewarded for providing energy and for enabling grid reliability. The two functions are compensated separately: with energy market payments and ancillary services market payments. We provide evidence of changes in the generation mix in the energy market that are driven by exogenous changes in an ancillary services market. We provide a theoretical framework and quasi‐experimental evidence for understanding the mechanism: it results from the multi‐product nature of power plants combined with discontinuities in costs. Although much research focuses solely on the energy market, our results suggest that spillovers between the two markets are important.
{"title":"Spillovers from ancillary services to wholesale energy markets","authors":"Jesse Buchsbaum, Catherine Hausman, Johanna L Mathieu, Jing Peng","doi":"10.1111/1756-2171.12459","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/1756-2171.12459","url":null,"abstract":"In electricity markets, generators are rewarded for providing energy and for enabling grid reliability. The two functions are compensated separately: with energy market payments and ancillary services market payments. We provide evidence of changes in the generation mix in the energy market that are driven by exogenous changes in an ancillary services market. We provide a theoretical framework and quasi‐experimental evidence for understanding the mechanism: it results from the multi‐product nature of power plants combined with discontinuities in costs. Although much research focuses solely on the energy market, our results suggest that spillovers between the two markets are important.","PeriodicalId":517123,"journal":{"name":"The RAND Journal of Economics","volume":"136 6","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139894861","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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