Optimal Contracts under Moral Hazard and Costly Lying

Keeyoung Rhee
Additional contact information
Keeyoung Rhee: Korea Development Institute

Korean Economic Review, 2021, vol. 37, 115-140

Abstract: We present a model in which the agent reports a privately observed signal about the stochastic outcome of her action, while bearing a cost of misreporting her private information. If the agent receives a low payment contingent on her performance, it is very costly for the agent to misreport her information to the principal so that the principal makes a decision favorable to the agent. However, if the contingent compensation is too high, the principal will terminate the project unless the agent truthfully reports that the project is likely to give a high return. The optimal outcome is achieved by a contract with the fee structure loosely tied with the outcome, but the cost of lying is necessarily high.

Keywords: Contract theory; moral hazard; strategic communication; lying costs (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D83 D86 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://keapaper.kea.ne.kr/RePEc/kea/keappr/KER-20210101-37-1-05.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kea:keappr:ker-20210101-37-1-05

Access Statistics for this article

Korean Economic Review is currently edited by Kyung Hwan Baik

More articles in Korean Economic Review from Korean Economic Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by KEA ().