 Optimal Contracting with Costly State Verification, with an Application to CrowdsourcingAislinn Bohren and
Troy Kravitz ()
PIER Working Paper Archive from Penn Institute for Economic Research, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania Abstract: A firm employs workers to obtain costly unverifiable information - for example, categorizing the content of images. Workers are monitored by comparing their messages. The optimal contract under limited liability exhibits three key features: (i) the monitoring technology depends crucially on the commitment power of the firm - virtual monitoring, or monitoring with arbitrarily small probability, is optimal when the firm can commit to truthfully reveal messages from other workers, while monitoring with strictly positive probability is optimal when the firm can hide messages (partial commitment), (ii) bundling multiple tasks reduces worker rents and monitoring inefficiencies; and (iii) the optimal contract is approximately efficient under full but not partial commitment. We conclude with an application to crowdsourcing platforms, and characterize the optimal contract for tasks found on these platforms. Pages: 50 pages Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pen:papers:16-023 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in PIER Working Paper Archive from Penn Institute for Economic Research, Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania 133 South 36th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104. Contact information at EDIRC. |
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