Optimal Delegation

Dezsoe Szalay

No 00-29, Sonderforschungsbereich 504 Publications from Sonderforschungsbereich 504, Universität Mannheim, Sonderforschungsbereich 504, University of Mannheim

Abstract: How should a principal delegate a task to an agent? This paper studies the principal's choice of an agent's freedom of action as an incentive problem. The optimal contract simultaneously copes with two problems of asymmetric information: the agent must be motivated to acquire productive information and he must be given incentives to use the information in the principal's interest. In order to provide the agent with proper incentives for information acquisition the principal may optimally choose to curtail the agent's authority over decision making even if there are no conflicts with respect to the decision itself. As a result the relationship between the severity of the conflict of principal's and agent's interests and the agent's optimal freedom of action is non-monotonic. Our theory provides a rationale for commonly observed phenomena such as 'demanding clear statements' from advisors or 'imposing an innovation bias' on an organizational structure.

Pages: 44 pages
Date: 2000-06-14
Note: Special thanks are due to Martin Hellwig for ongoing discussions and advice. I would also like to thank Jacques Crémer, Sascha Haller, Nobuhiro Kiyotaki, Christian Laux, Nicolas Melissas, Benny Moldovanu and John Moore as well as the participants of the Mannheim workshop in economic theory for very useful discussions and comments. Financial support of the Swiss Science National Foundation is greatfully acknowledged. All remaining errors are my own.
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
Working Paper: Optimal Delegation (2000)
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:xrs:sfbmaa:00-29

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Sonderforschungsbereich 504 Publications from Sonderforschungsbereich 504, Universität Mannheim Contact information at EDIRC., Sonderforschungsbereich 504, University of Mannheim
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Carsten Schmidt ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).