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Title: Relational Delegation

Author(s): Ricardo Alonso and Niko Matouschek

Publication Date: January 2005

Keyword(s): cheap talk, delegation and relational contract

Programme Area(s): Industrial Organization

Abstract: We explore the optimal delegation of decision rights by a principal to a better informed but biased agent. In an infinitely repeated game a long-lived principal faces a series of short-lived agents. Every period they play a cheap talk game a la Crawford and Sobel (1982) with constant bias, quadratic loss functions and general distributions of the state of the world. We characterize the optimal delegation schemes for all discount rates and show that they resemble organizational arrangements that are commonly observed, including centralization and threshold delegation. For small biases threshold delegation is optimal for almost all distributions. Outsourcing can only be optimal if the principal is sufficiently impatient.

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Bibliographic Reference

Alonso, R and Matouschek, N. 2005. 'Relational Delegation'. London, Centre for Economic Policy Research. https://cepr.org/active/publications/discussion_papers/dp.php?dpno=4870