研讨论文

《The Theory of Optimal Delegation with anApplication to Tariff Caps》 by Manuel Amador and KyleBagwell,Econometrica 2013

《Money burning in the theory of delegation》 byManuel Amador and Kyle BagwellGames andEconomic Behavior 2020

主讲人

王岑文

402cc永利中国公共财政与政策研究院研究生

内容简介

This body of work develops a comprehensive theoryof optimal delegation in settings with an informed but biased agent and without contingent transfers. The 2013 Econometrica paper establishes a general Lagrangian framework to provide necessary and sufficient conditions under which a simple interval allocation (e.g., a cap) is optimal. It demonstrates that while the possibility of  "money burning" —wasteful expenditures—makes such simple contracts harder to justify, they remain optimal under specific conditions concerning relative preference concavity, which is applied to explain tariff caps in trade agreements.

The 2020 Games and Economic Behavior paper extends this framework to characterize optimal contracts when simple interval delegation fails. It provides sufficient conditions for two classes of contracts that actively utilize money burning as an incentive tool: one combining full flexibility with money burning, and another combining pooling with money burning: depending on the severity of the agent's bias. To gether these papers provide a unified approach for understanding both simple and complex delegation contracts.