DP4870 Relational Delegation
Author(s): | Ricardo Alonso, Niko Matouschek |
Publication Date: | January 2005 |
Keyword(s): | cheap talk, delegation, relational contract |
JEL(s): | D23, D82, L23 |
Programme Areas: | Industrial Organization |
Link to this Page: | cepr.org/active/publications/discussion_papers/dp.php?dpno=4870 |
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.