Perks: Contractual Arrangements to Restrain Moral Hazard

Perks are a commodity bundle offered by an employer to an employee. They are used to directly control an employee's consumption. Consuming certain goods increases the marginal disutility of non-contractible effort. Lower consumption of such goods will make it less costly to induce an employee to put in high effort. To compensate for the decrease in such goods, an employer gives luxurious perks. By "luxurious" I mean that per-dollar marginal utilities of these perks are lower than those of other goods. This model explains the existence of perks such as box seat tickets and club memberships, which neither save tax nor enter the production function. Also, perks can be more luxurious at an unsuccessful outcome than at a successful outcome, and an employee with a more successful history receives more perks.

Futures Market: Contractual Arrangement to Restrain Moral Hazard in Teams

Holmstrom (1982) argues that a principal is required to restrain moral hazard in a team: wasting output in a certain state is required to enforce efficient effort, and the principal is a commitment device for such enforcement. Under competition in commodity and team-formation markets, I extend his model a la Prescott and Townsend (1984) to show that competitive contracts can exploit the futures market to transfer output across states instead of wasting it. Thus, the futures market replaces the role of principals. An important feature of such contracts is exclusiveness: private access to the the futures market by team members is not allowed. The duality of linear programming is exploited to characterize a market environment and the contractual agreements for efficiency.

Efficient Consumer Altruism and Fair Trade

Consumers have shown willingness to pay a premium for products labeled as "Fair Trade" and to prefer retailers that are seen as more generous to their suppliers and employees. We define a fair trade product as a bundle of a consumption good and a donation. An altruistic consumer will only choose this bundle over its separate elements if the bundle is less expensive. Thus, for fair trade to be sustainable in a competitive equilibrium, an efficiency must be generated. In general, the first-best level of investment (to reduce the retailer's cost or boosts quality) cannot be achieved when it is non-verifiable. However, the altruism of the consumer facilitates a more efficient contract: by paying the supplier more, the retailer can both extract more consumer surplus and increase the level of contracted investment, while preserving incentive compatibility. We provide empirical and anecdotal evidence for the assumptions and predictions of this model, focusing on the coffee industry.

Correlated Equilibrium and the Pricing of Public Goods.

Lindahl equilibrium is an application of price-taking behavior to achieve efficiency in the allocation of public goods. Such an equilibrium requires individuals to be strategically naive, i.e., Lindahl equilibrium is not incentive compatible. Correlated equilibrium is defined precisely to take account of strategic behavior and incentive compatibility. Using the duality theory of linear programming, we show that these two seemingly disparate notions can be combined to give a public goods, Lindahl pricing characterization of efficient correlated equilibria. We also show that monopoly theory can be used to characterize inefficient correlated equilibria.

Futures Market: Contractual Arrangement to Restrain Moral Hazard in Teams

Holmstrom (1982) argues that a principal is required to restrain moral hazard in a team: wasting output in a certain state is required to enforce efficient effort, and the principal is a commitment device for such enforcement. Under competition in commodity and team-formation markets, I extend his model a la Prescott and Townsend (1984) to show that competitive contracts can exploit the futures market to transfer output across states instead of wasting it. Thus, the futures market replaces the role of principals. An important feature of such contracts is exclusiveness: private access to the futures market by team members is now allowed. The duality of linear programming is exploited to characterize a market environment and the contractual agreements for efficiency

Perks: Contractual Arrangements to Restrain Moral Hazard

Perks are a commodity bundle offered by an employer to an employee. They are used to directly control an employee's consumption. Consuming certain goods increases the marginal disutility of non-contractible effort. Lower consumption of such goods will make it less costly to induce an employee to put in high effort. To compensate for the decrease in such goods, an employer gives luxurious perks. By "luxurious" I mean that per-dollar marginal utilities of these perks are lower than those of other goods. This model explains the existence of perks such as box seat tickets and club memberships, which neither save tax nor enter the production function. Also, perks can be more luxurious at an unsuccessful outcome than at a successful outcome, and an employee with a more successful history receives more perks

Bootstrapping Cointegrating Regressions

In this paper, we consider bootstrapping cointegrating regressions. It is shown that the method of bootstrap, if properly implemented, generally yields consistent estimators and test statistics for cointegrating regressions. We do not assume any specific data generating process, and employ the sieve bootstrap based on the approximated finite-order vector autoregressions for the regression errors and the firrst differences of the regressors. In particular, we establish the bootstrap consistency for OLS method. The bootstrap method can thus be used to correct for the finite sample bias of the OLS estimator and to approximate the asymptotic critical values of the OLS-based test statistics in general cointegrating regressions. The bootstrap OLS procedure, however, is not efficient. For the efficient estimation and hypothesis testing, we consider the procedure proposed by Saikkonen (1991) and Stock and Watson (1993) relying on the regression augmented with the leads and lags of differenced regressors. The bootstrap versions of their procedures are shown to be consistent, and can be used to do inferences that are asymptotically valid. A Monte Carlo study is conducted to investigate the finite sample performances of the proposed bootstrap methods.

Perks as Second Best Optimal Compensations

The finance literature views perks either as productivity enhancing expenditures or as a result of poor managerial control by shareholders. Using a corporate jet to attend a business meeting may be justified because of the returns generated for the firm; but flying on the same jet to reach a vacation resort reflects a misappropriation of the firm’s resources by the manager. Our paper challenges this view. We argue that complementarity between leisure and wages creates difficult incentive problems, because the bonuses or stock options that reward success increase the marginal disutility of effort. In such a context, we show that whenever there exist commodities (‘perks’) that are substitute to leisure (or even less complementary to leisure than money), the optimal incentive scheme involves overprovision of such commodities, in the sense that the agent should consume more of them that she would elect to, should she be given a choice between money and perks at the current market prices. This conclusion is valid even when perks must be provided independently of the manager’s performace. Finally, we discuss the role of governance by introducing manipulations a la Peng and Röell (2006), and show that, in contrast with standard intuition, perks are used even when governance is perfect, and poorer governance may result in less perks being offered to the agent.Perks, Moral Hazard, Incentives, Second Best