Rank-Order Contracts for a Principal with Many Agents

James Malcomson

The Review of Economic Studies, 1986, vol. 53, issue 5, 807-817

Abstract: For a principal with many agents, rank-order contracts remain incentive compatible even when information about agents' performance is known only to the principal because the total payment from the principal to all agents taken together is independent of the outcome that occurs. Under wider conditions than those considered previously in the literature, there is shown to exist a rank-order contract equivalent, exactly or approximately, to any (nonlinear) piece-rate contract. Under those conditions, therefore, results that depend on the unenforceability of piece rates under such asymmetric information disappear if rank-order contracts can be used.

Date: 1986
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (50)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.2307/2297720 (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:oup:restud:v:53:y:1986:i:5:p:807-817.

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Economic Studies is currently edited by Thomas Chaney, Xavier d’Haultfoeuille, Andrea Galeotti, Bård Harstad, Nir Jaimovich, Katrine Loken, Elias Papaioannou, Vincent Sterk and Noam Yuchtman

More articles in The Review of Economic Studies from Review of Economic Studies Ltd
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().