(Apologies for the long delay since the last post. I’ve been in that tiniest of Southeast Asian backwaters, East Timor, talking to UN and NGO folks about how the new democracy is coming along. The old rule of thumb is that you need 25 years of free and fair elections before society consolidates a democracy, but we still have a lot to learn about how that process takes place. I have some theoretical ideas about how to avoid cozy/corrupt links between government ministers and the private sector in these unconsolidated democracies, and I wanted to get some anecdotes which might guide that theory. And in case you’re wondering: I would give pretty high odds that, for a variety of reasons, the Timorese economy is going absolutely nowhere fast. Now back to the usual new research summaries…)
Teamwork is essential, you’re told from kindergarten on. But teamwork presents a massive moral hazard problem: how do I make sure the other guy does his share? In the static setting, Alchain-Demsetz (1972) and a series of papers by Holmstrom (May He Win His Deserved Nobel) have long ago discussed why people will free ride when their effort is hidden, and what contracts can be written to avoid this problem. Bonatti and Horner make the problem dynamic, and with a few pretty standard tricks from optimal control develop some truly counterintuitive results.
The problem is the following. N agents are engaged in working on a project which is “good” with probability p. Agents exert costly effort continuously over time. Depending on the effort exerted by agents at any given time, a breakthrough occurs with some probability if the project is good, but never occurs if the project is bad. Over time, given effort along the equilibrium path, agents become more and more pessimistic about the project being good if no breakthrough occurs. The future is discounted. Agents only observe their own effort choice (but have correct beliefs about the effort of others in equilibrium). This means that off-path, beliefs of effort exertion are not common knowledge: if I deviate and work harder now, and no breakthrough occurs, then I am more pessimistic than others about the goodness of the project since I know, and they don’t, that a higher level of effort was put in.
In this setting, not only do agents shirk (hoping the other agents will pick up the slack), but they also procrastinate. Imagine a two-period world. In a two period world, I can shift some effort to period 2, in the hope that the other agent’s period 1 effort will lead to a success. I don’t want to work extremely hard in period 1 when all that this leads to is wasted effort because my teammate has already solved the problem in that period. Note that this procrastination motive is not optimal when the team is of size 1: you need a coauthor to justify your slacking! Better monitoring here does not help, surprisingly. If I can see how much effort my opponent puts in each period, then what happens? If I decrease my period 1 effort, and this is observable by both agents, then my teammate will not be so pessimistic about the success of the project in period 2. Hence, she will work harder in period 2. Hence, each agent has an incentive to work less in period 1 vis-a-vis the hidden action case. (Of course, you may wonder why this is an equilibrium; that is, why doesn’t the teammate play grim trigger and punish me for shirking? It turns out there are a number of reasonable equilibria in the case with observable actions, some of which give higher welfare and some of which give lower welfare than under hidden action. The point is just that allowing observability doesn’t necessarily help things.)
So what have we learned? Three things in particular. First, work in teams gives extra incentive to procrastinate compared to solo work. Second, this means that setting binding deadlines can be welfare improving; the authors further show that the larger the team, the tighter the deadline necessary. Third, letting teams observe how hard the other is working is not necessarily optimal. Surely observability by a principal would be welfare-enhancing – the contract could be designed to look like dynamic Holmstrom – but observability between the agents is not necessarily so. Interesting stuff.
http://cowles.econ.yale.edu/P/cd/d16b/d1695.pdf (Final Cowles Foundation WP – paper published in April 2011 AER)
A Fine Theorem 