Contract related agents

Imperial Users onl

Contract Development Strategy in Reducing the Risk with House of Risk Method in Pt. KLO (Case Study Oil&Gas Company In Indonesia)

Contract development of procurement process at Oil Company as PT. KLO should follows many regulations of contract development. At the other side, there are some near misses/failure contracts because of unable to anticipate the risk earlier. There is no research to categorize the risk order and strategy to mitigate the risk. This research aim is to identify risk events, identify risk agents, and mitigation strategy of contract development process with House of Risk (HOR) method. The core of supply chain process to make contract already analyzed to identify the risk potential and effect resulted. Risk agents and related probabilities also already analyzed. Aggregate of risk potential was defined for each risk agents to know the damage level. This method was applied at department of contract & buying of PT. KLO Company, one biggest operator of oil and gas exploration in Indonesia through cooperation with Oil and Gas institution of Indonesia Republic (SKK Migas). The research findings identify thirty four (34) risk agents and twelve (12) the main mitigation actions that significantly effective to reduce the contract making risks in PT. KLO Keywords: contract making, risk cause, House of Risk, regulation of goods procuremen

Bargaining Structure and Nominal Wage Flexibility

In a model with heterogenous agents, wage setting by monopoly unions and monetary policy conducted by a central bank, we show that the duration of nominal wage contracts is u-shaped in the degree of centralization, with intermediate bargaining systems yielding contracts of shorter duration and thus more flexible nominal wages than both decentralized and centralized systems. We also find the optimal level of centralization of wage bargaining to be negatively related to the degree of heterogeneity in the economy. The theoretical predictions of the model are tested on OECD data. There is empirical support for the main results regarding contract length, while there is less support for the predictions regarding the level of centralization.nominal wage flexibility; contract length; bargaining structure; monetary policy

Using Ex Ante Payments in Self-Enforcing Risk-Sharing Contracts

In this paper we analyze a long-term risk-sharing contract between two risk-averse agents facing self-enforcing constraints. We enlarge the contracting space to allow for an ex ante transfer (at the beginning of the period) before the state of nature is realized. We analyze the trade-off between the self-enforcing constraints of the two agents by characterizing the optimal ex ante and ex post transfer payments. We show that optimal ex ante payments are non-stationary. They optimally depend on the surplus from the relationship each agent expects. The size of the ex ante payment an agent makes is inversely related to its expected surplus from the relationship. The introduction of ex ante payments generates interesting dynamic properties. In a two-state example with i.i.d. shocks, the dynamics of the optimal contract exhibit experience rating even though there is no private information or learning taking place. Ce papier analyse les propriétés dynamiques d'un contrat de partage de risque entre deux agents riscophobes qui font face à des contraintes de faillite. L'espace des contrats est élargi pour permettre aux agents d'effectuer un transfert au début de chacune des périodes avant la réalisation de l'incertitude. Ces paiements ex ante ne sont pas stationnaires. Ils dépendent du surplus que chaque agent attend de la relation. Ce paiement est inversement proportionnel à ce surplus. Dans un environnement i.i.d. à deux états de la nature, les propriétés dynamiques de la consommation de chacun des agents démontrent un lissage qui ressemble à de la tarification a posteriori.Risk sharing; Dynamic relationship; Self enforcing contracts, Partage de risque ; Relation dynamique ; Contrats auto-exécutoires

Event-B Patterns for Specifying Fault-Tolerance in Multi-Agent Interaction

Interaction in a multi-agent system is susceptible to failure. A rigorous development of a multi-agent system must include the treatment of fault-tolerance of agent interactions for the agents to be able to continue to function independently. Patterns can be used to capture fault-tolerance techniques. A set of modelling patterns is presented that specify fault-tolerance in Event-B specifications of multi-agent interactions. The purpose of these patterns is to capture common modelling structures for distributed agent interaction in a form that is re-usable on other related developments. The patterns have been applied to a case study of the contract net interaction protocol

Working and Negotiating with Publishers: The Devil\u27s in the Details

Several people have expressed interest in meeting to talk about what’s involved in dealing with publishers, what kind of questions should one ask, and what aspects of a contract are especially important to pay attention to. Join Julie Hendon, Scholarly Communications Librarians Janelle Wertzberger and Chris Barnes, and special guests Dan DeNicola (Philosophy) and Radi Rangelova (Spanish/LACLS) for an informal discussion of these issues based on your concerns or questions. We also welcome questions related to journal publishing or being a contributor to an edited volume. We’re not lawyers or literary agents but we have experience with publishers, especially those involved in academic or scholarly publishing. Sponsored by the Johnson Center for Creative Teaching and Learning

Bounded Rationality and Incomplete Contracts

This paper explores the link between boundedly rational behaviour and incomplete contracts. The bounded rationality of the agents in our world is embodied in a constraint that the contracts they write must be algorithmic in nature. We start with a definition of contract incompleteness that seems both appealing and widely applicable. Our first task is then to show that, by itself, the algorithmic nature of contracts is not enough to generate genuinely incomplete contracts in equilibrium. As in Anderlini and Felli (1994), we call this the Approximation Result. We then consider contractual situations in which the complexity costs of a contract are explicitly taken into accoaunt. We consider a broad (axiomatically defined) class of complexity measures and in this framework we show that incomplete contracts obtain in equilibrium. We also extensively discuss some recent literature directly related to the results reported hereIncomplete contracts, bounded rationality, complexity costs

The Impact Of Risk On Contract Structure In A Principal-agent Model: An Application To The Alberta Sugar Beet Industry

The paper models a particular share contract (that between the refiner and growers of sugar beets in southern Alberta) within the context of the principal-agent paradigm. That is, a principal (the refiner) chooses contractual terms so as to motivate the agents (the growers) to apply that amount of variable input (fertilizer) which leaves the principal\u27s expected utility being maximized. The central issue considered is how specific contractual terms are related to the attitudes toward risk of the individuals. In carrying through with this exercise, we examine the actual contract in order to restrict the contracts considered to a subset of those which are theoretically possible. For instance, a share contract may involve monitoring by the principal but since the actual sugar beet contract does not, we assume that the cost of monitoring outweigh the benefits; instead of trying to characterize the forces which give rise to a contract which does not involve monitoring.;Once the theoretical analysis is completed, a simulation experiment then shows how the terms of the contract and input use respond to changes in the attitudes toward risk of principal and the agents, along with adjustments in the characteristics of their subjective probability distributions

Work-Related Perks, Agency Problems, and Optimal Incentive Contracts

This paper examines the effects of work-related perks, such as corporate jets and limousines, nice offices, secretarial staff, etc., on the optimal incentive contract. In a linear contracting framework, perks characterized by complementarities between production and consumption improve the trade-off between incentives and insurance that determines the optimal contract for a risk-averse agent. We show that (i) the perk may be offered even if its direct consumption and productivity benefits are offset by its cost; (ii) the perk will be offered for free; (iii) agents in more uncertain production environments will receive more perks; (iv) senior executives should receive both more perks and stronger explicit incentives; and (v) better corporate governance can lead firms to award their CEOs more perks. Our analysis also offers insights into the firms’decisions about how much autonomy they should grant to their employees and about optimal perk provision when managers and workers are organized in teams.Job Perks, Agency Problems, Optimal Incentive Contracts

Long-term versus Short-term Contracting in Salesforce Compensation

This dissertation investigates multi-period salesforce incentive contracting. The first chapter is an overview of the problems as well as the main findings. The second chapter continues with a review of the related literatures. The third and fourth chapters address a central question in salesforce contracting: how frequently should a firm compensate its sales agents over a long-term horizon? Agents can game the long-term contract by varying their effort levels dynamically over time, as discussed in Chapter 3, or by altering between a “bold" action and a “safe" action dynamically over time, as discussed in Chapter 4. Chapter 3 studies multi-period salesforce incentive provisions when agents are able to vary their demand-enhancing effort levels dynamically. I establish a stylized agency-theory model to analyze this central question. I consider salespeople's dynamic responses in exerting effort (often known as “gaming"). I find that long time horizon contracts weakly dominate short time horizon contracts, even though they enable gaming by the agent, because they allow compensation to be contingent on more extreme outcomes; this not only motivates the salesperson more, but also leads to lower expected payment to the salesperson. A counterintuitive observation that my analysis provides is that under the optimal long time horizon contract, the firm may find it optimal to induce the agent to not exert high effort in every period. This provides a rationale for effort exertion patterns that are often interpreted as suboptimal for the firm (e.g., exerting effort only in early periods, often called “giving up"; exerting effort only in later periods, often called “postponing effort"). I also discuss the implication of sales pull-in and push-out, and dependence of periods (through limited inventory) upon the structure of the optimal contracting. Chapter 4 examines multi-period salesforce incentive contracting, where sales agents can dynamically choose between a bold action with higher sales potential but also higher variance, and a safe action with limited sales potential but lower variance. I find that the contract format is determined by how much the firm wants later actions to depend on earlier outcomes. Making later actions independent of earlier demand outcomes reduces agents' gaming, but it also reduces an agent's incentive to take bold actions. When the two periods are independent, an extreme two-period contract with a hard-to-achieve quota, or a polarized two-period contract allowing agents to make up sales, can strictly dominate a period-by-period contract, because they induce more bold actions in earlier periods by making later actions dependent on earlier outcomes. However, when the two periods are dependent through a limited inventory to be sold across two periods, the period-by-period contract can strictly dominate the two-period contract, by allowing the principal more flexibility in adjusting the contract