This thesis consists of three essays on the economics of contracts and organizations. The first essay studies organizational design as the allocation of decision rights, primarily focusing on its interplay with agents' career motives. It identifies a new tradeoff between delegation and centralization, which arises solely from career concerns: When delegated, an agent takes inefficient actions at the cost of a principal but also works harder ex post to implement his project, in order to manipulate the market expectations of his ability. Compared to the existing literature, the contribution of this study is two-fold. First, it endogenizes the agent's bias as a result of career concerns. Second, and perhaps more importantly, it uncovers a new link between organizational design and the implementation of a decision. Both of these features are in sharp contrast to the vast majority of the existing studies, which takes the agent's bias as given and abstracts away from the implementation stage of a decision process. Specifically, delegation can be strictly optimal in the present framework even if the agent has no information advantage over the principal.
Motivated by some entry-level labor markets, the second essay studies an incentive-contracting problem where (i) a principal learns an agent's ability before the agent himself, and (ii) both the agent's productivity with the principal as well as his outside option depends on his ability. I characterize the optimal contracts for the principal, defined to be the most profitable equilibrium outcomes among those satisfying the D1 criterion; pooling at an earlier date is strictly optimal if the agent's outside option is sufficiently sensitive to the principal's private information, whereas separation at a later date is (weakly) optimal otherwise.Further, the principal's profit is shown to be neither continuous nor monotone with respect to the agent's outside option.
The third essay studies stable and (one-sided) strategy-proof matching rules in many-to-one matching markets with contracts. First, the number of such rules is shown to be at most one.
Second, the doctor-optimal stable rule, whenever it exists, is shown to be the unique candidate for a stable and strategy-proof rule. Notably, these results are established without any substitutes conditions on hospitals' choice functions, and hence, the proofs do not rely on the "rural hospital" theorem. Finally, a stable and strategy-proof rule, when exists, is shown to be second-best optimal for doctor welfare, in the sense that no individually-rational and strategy-proof rule can dominate it. / Economics
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:harvard.edu/oai:dash.harvard.edu:1/17467213 |
| Date | 17 July 2015 |
| Creators | Hirata, Daisuke |
| Contributors | Hart, Oliver |
| Publisher | Harvard University |
| Source Sets | Harvard University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis or Dissertation, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | open |
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