American Economic Review Vol. 104 No. 1 2014
Aligned Delegation
Abstract
A principal delegates multiple decisions to an agent, who has private information relevant to each decision. The principal is uncertain about the agent's preferences. I solve for max-min optimal mechanisms—those which maximize the principal's payoff against the worst case agent preference types. These mechanisms are characterized by a property I call “aligned delegation”: all agent types play identically, as if they shared the principal's preferences. Max-min optimal mechanisms may take the simple forms of ranking mechanisms, budgets, or sequential quotas.
- DOI
- 10.1257/aer.104.1.66
- Volume
- 104
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 66-83
- Language
- en
- Sources
- bibtex:phds-export.bib crossref openalex